Adaptive partition size temporal error concealment for H.264

Existing temporal error concealment methods for H.264 often decide the partition size of the lost macroblock (MB) before recovering the motion information, without actual quality comparison between different partition modes. In this paper, we propose to select the best partition mode by minimizing the Weighted Double-Sided External Boundary Matching Error (WDS-EBME), which jointly measures the inter-MB boundary discontinuity, inter-partition boundary discontinuity and intrapartition block artifacts in the recovered MB. The proposed method estimates the best motion vectors for each of the candidate partition modes, calculates the overall WDS-EBME values for them, and selects the partition mode with the smallest overall WDS-EBME to recover the lost MB. We also propose a progressive concealment order for the 4times4 partition mode. Test results show that the adaptive partition size method always outperforms the fixed partition size methods. Both the adaptive and fixed partition size methods are much superior to the temporal error concealment (TEC) method in the H.264 reference software.