New hybrid error concealment for digital compressed video

Transmission of a compressed video signal over a lossy communication network exposes the information to losses and errors, which leads to significant visible errors in the reconstructed frames at the decoder side. In this paper we present a new hybrid error concealment algorithm for compressed video sequences, based on temporal and spatial concealment methods. We describe spatial and temporal techniques for the recovery of lost blocks. In particular, we develop postprocessing techniques for the reconstruction of missing or damaged macroblocks. A new decision support tree is developed to efficiently choose the best appropriate error concealment method, according to the spatial and temporal characteristics of the sequence. The proposed algorithm is compared to three error concealment methods: spatial, temporal, and a previous hybrid approach using different noise levels. The results are evaluated using four quality measures. We show that our error concealment scheme outperforms all the other three methods for all the tested video sequences.