Content-based adaptive spatio-temporal methods for MPEG repair

Block loss and propagation error due to cell loss or missing packet information during the transmission over lossy networks can cause severe degradation of block and predictive-based video coding. Herein, new fast spatial and temporal methods are presented for block loss recovery. In the spatial algorithm, missing block recovery and edge extention are performed by pixel replacement based on range constraints imposed by surrounding neighborhood edge information and structure. In the temporal algorithm, an adaptive temporal correlation method is proposed for motion vector (MV) recovery. Parameters for the temporal correlation measurement are adaptively changed in accordance to surrounding edge information of a missing macroblock (MB). The temporal technique utilizes pixels in the reference frame as well as surrounding pixels of the lost block. Spatial motion compensation is applied after MV recovery when the reference frame does not have sufficient information for lost MB restoration. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithms recover image information reliably using both spatial and temporal restoration. We compare the proposed algorithm with other procedures with consistently favorable results.