Inter-layer error concealment for scalable video coding based on motion vector averaging and slice interleaving

Scalable video coding (SVC) is desirable for video applications in heterogeneous environments where users have a variety of terminals. Because motion-compensated prediction is used in SVC codec, when SVC video is transmitted over loss-prone networks, the decompressed video can suffer severe visual degradation across multiple frames. In order to overcome this, one scheme utilized at the decoder is error concealment to enhance the visual quality. This paper assumes that the packet delivery of the base layer is loss-prone the same way as the enhancement layer. Three inter-layer error concealment methods are proposed using two new approaches. (1) Motion vector averaging using adaptively averaging over multiple types of motion vectors in different layers for the recovery of lost motion vectors. (2) Slice interleaving utilizing an optimum ordering technique to make the average distance between two contiguous slices as far as possible. A two-layer spatial-temporal scalable video coding system is developed to evaluate the existing and proposed error concealment methods. The impact of burst packet losses and error propagation on the frames in both layers is investigated. Experimental results verified that the proposed error concealment methods outperform two existing methods.