Improved mode selection in hybrid error concealment for multi-broadcast-reception

Digital TV signals are often degraded by lost macro blocks or slices if received with mobile devices. Recently, we introduced a technique for inter-sequence error concealment in multi-broadcast scenarios which reconstruct lost image blocks of video signals by inserting error-free blocks of corresponding reference signals. The algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art techniques by up to 15 dB PSNR_Y. The quality of reconstructed image blocks can he further enhanced by combining inter-sequence error concealment with a temporal concealment approach as we showed in 2009. To enhance the robustness of this hybrid error concealment, we propose a novel metric for mode selection in this paper which takes into account local image statistics. While keeping the complexity of hybrid error concealment nearly constant, a mean gain of up to 2.1 dB and a peak gain of up to 10.1 dB in terms of PSNR_Y can be achieved additionally.