Video error concealment by using iterative dynamic-programming optimization

This paper addresses an error concealment technique, focusing on motion vector (MV) recovery for inter-coded frames, to improve video quality at decoder when video bit stream data are incurred transmission errors. The proposed algorithm considers slice (i.e., a row of macroblocks (MBs)) errors and uses DP (Dynamic Programming) optimization technique to estimate the lost MVs in a combined manner, differing from the traditional Boundary Matching Algorithm (BMA) which recovers MV independently for each erroneous MB. We also consider MV recovery for blocks of 8×8, 8×16, and 16×8 pixels (rather than 16×16 pixels MBs only) and apply an iterative DP process to refine the estimated results. Experimental results show that our algorithm outperforms the well-known BMA by up to 1.36 dB in PSNR and a newly published algorithm by up to 0.56 dB at a pack loss rate of up to 15%. Subjective evaluation shows that our algorithm takes the advantages of moderate speed and accurate recovery of contiguous line/curve features in images.