Joint temporal error control for H.264

In this paper, we propose a joint temporal error control (JTEC) method for H.264 which combines RDO-based macroblock (MB) classification at the encoder and adaptive partition size error concealment at the decoder. The encoder classifies the MBs by evaluating the sensitivity of the MBs as the RD cost between the concealment error and the bits needed for the additional motion information. Additional motion information can be transmitted for the error sensitive MBs such as the original motion vector or motion vector index. The decoder utilizes the additional motion information for the sensitive blocks. Non-sensitive blocks are concealed by the adaptive partition size (APS) method. APS selects the best partition mode for error concealment by minimizing the weighted double-side external boundary matching error (WDS-EBME), which jointly measures the inter-MB boundary discontinuity, inter-partition boundary discontinuity and intra-partition block artifacts in the recovered MB. A progressive concealment method is developed for the 4 times 4 partition mode.