A directional temporal error concealment algorithm for H.264

Packet losses or errors of compressed video streams during transmission over error-prone channel may cause serious decline in video quality. Error concealment (EC) at decoder side is an effective technology to reduce this degradation. This paper proposes a Directional Temporal Boundary Match Algorithm (DTBMA) for H.264 considering pixel differences in three directions and "guessing" the "real" boundary difference exploiting temporal correlation. Furthermore, a Variable Block Error Concealment (VBEC) method using DTBMA is proposed. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm increases PSNR and improves subjective video quality compared with conventional temporal error concealment algorithms in the case of the same packet loss rate.