Adaptive joint spatio-temporal error concealment for video communication

In the past years, video communication has found its application in an increasing number of environments. Unfortunately, some of them are error-prone and the risk of block losses caused by transmission errors is ubiquitous. To reduce the effects of these block losses, a new spatio-temporal error concealment algorithm is presented. The algorithm uses spatial as well as temporal information for extrapolating the signal into the lost areas. The extrapolation is carried out in two steps, first a preliminary temporal extrapolation is performed which then is used to generate a model of the original signal, using the spatial neighborhood of the lost block. By applying the spatial refinement a significantly higher concealment quality can be achieved resulting in a gain of up to 5.2 dB in PSNR compared to the unrefined underlying pure temporal extrapolation.