An improved fast and efficient spatial error concealment technique with boundary matching for block-based video coding systems

Compressed video bitstream is sensitive to channel errors that may severely degrade the reconstructed pictures. Error concealment techniques implemented at decoders are effective approaches to reduce the impact of errors. They mask the effect of missing blocks by using the spatial or/and temporal correlation to create image or video of subjectively acceptable quality. This paper proposes an improved spatial error concealment technique based on the fast and efficient method (FEM) proposed in with a new matching criterion for macroblock (MB) recovery. This criterion considers the spatial smoothness property to search for best match between neighboring MBs in spatial domain for MB recovery instead of classical matching criterion. Experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm is obviously subjectively and objectively superior to that proposed in for isolated errored macroblocks.