Adaptive block distance interpolation for MDC frame recovery

Temporal Multiple Description Coding (T-MDC) is more robust to transmission errors in delivering video quality over networks than the conventional single description (streaming) coding (SDC). In general, T-MDC becomes more error resilient when the number of its descriptions increases, with a cost of higher bit rate overhead. Such an overhead should be constrained in a low bandwidth networking environment, where 2-description T-MDC is preferred. To compensate for the weaker error resilience due to bit rate saving, several conventional error concealment algorithms have been proposed for frame recovery of 2-description T-MDC. In the same context, this paper presents a novel error concealment algorithm called ABDI (Adaptive Block Distance Interpolation). The novelty of ABDI is two-folded: (1) ABDI provides an adaptation mechanism to dynamically select a smaller block-based SAD (Sum of Absolute Difference) from its two component algorithms called BDI (Block Distance Interpolation) and BPA (Bidirectional Pixel Average); (2) BDI can non-linearly reconstruct the motion vector of any missing block in the lost frame so that every lost frame can be recovered by using all its reconstructed motion vectors to grab frame recovery materials bi-directionally from the preceding and succeeding reference frames which belong to the video description successfully received. Our results show that ABDI outperforms all the conventional algorithms.