Improving error resilience of scalable H.264 (SVC) via drift control

Common error concealment schemes mitigate errors for frames in which losses occur only, even though errors propagate to future frames. Drift control is generally challenging due to lack of reliable basis for determining what needs to be corrected and how. In this paper, we show that for scalable or multi-layer video, an available base-layer can serve as such basis to allow continous error drift checking and correction of higher layers even when the base-layer is of much lower spatial resolution. The associated algorithm is low-complexity, incurs no additional bit cost, and experiments using SVC reference software show PSNR improvement of up to 5 dB over concealment methods without drift control.