An improved inter frame error concealment in H.264/AVC

Transmission of compressed video over error prone channels may result in packet losses or errors, which can significantly degrade the image quality. Aimed this problem, non-normative error concealment (EC) is recommended in H.264/AVC to recover the lost image. By analyzing of non-normative inter EC, this paper focused on improvement of it. Firstly, since the "guessed\´Vrecovered MV (motion vector) in existing EC is not so close to the real MV, a refined MV recovery is proposed to get a more accurate "guessed" MV. Secondly an improved MV selection criterion (side matching criterion) is proposed, which is trying to "guess\´Vapproach a lost MB (macroblock)\´s real/original side match distortion, instead of "guess\´Vapproach value 0 in traditional inter EC. In addition, for MV refinement scheme, inspired by MV searching in motion estimation, we adopt a diamond searching for MV recovery. Both objective and subjective image quality evaluation in experiments show that our proposal achieves a better image recovery compared with non-normative inter EC.