Hybrid error concealment method combining exemplar-based image inpainting and spatial interpolation

This paper proposes an efficient error concealment method for the reconstruction of pixels that are lost in video communication. The proposed method is developed by combining exemplar-based image inpainting for patch reconstruction and spatial interpolation for pixel reconstruction using adaptive threshold by local complexity. By exemplar-based image inpainting, regions with regular structures are reconstructed. For complex regions with irregular structures, just one pixel is reconstructed using the proposed spatial interpolation method. The proposed spatial interpolation method performs reconstruction by selecting adaptively directional interpolation or neighbor interpolation based on gradient information. Simulation results show that the proposed hybrid method performs reconstruction with significantly improved subjective quality compared with the previous spatial error concealment and image inpainting methods. The proposed method also gives substantial improvements of PSNR compared with the previous methods. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.