Efficient temporal error concealment algorithm for H.264/AVC inter frame decoding

During the real-time video transmission over error-prone network, the compressed video signal is very sensitive to the channel disturbances, and the packet loss cannot be avoided which causes the video quality reduction in the destination. To satisfy the audiences' visual feeling, the decoder attempts to conceal the error effect by using the spatial or temporal domain information to estimate the missing video content. In this paper, an efficient temporal error concealment (ETEC) algorithm is proposed for H.264/AVC Inter frame decoding to eliminate the error effect for Human Visual System (HVS). The 4 x 4 block size is used as the basic motion vector (MV) recovery unit to increase the error concealment (EC) accuracy, and the MV of the lost macroblock (MB) is recovered by employing the MV information of the neighboring intact MBs based on the geometry and data interpolation. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve better performance compared with the existing TEC methods not only for the objective quality measurement, but also for the HVS subjective view perception. Because of its simple composition, the proposed algorithm is pervasive to be used in the real-time multimedia communication systems with the video coding standard H.264/AVC. Copyright (C) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.