This paper proposes an error concealment technique for video transmission, focusing on motion vector (MV) recovery for both inter- and intra-coded frames, to improve video quality at decoder when video bit stream data incur transmission errors. The proposed algorithm considers slice (i.e., a row of macroblocks (MBs)) errors and uses DP (Dynamic Programming) optimization technique to estimate the lost MVs in a global manner, differing from the traditional Boundary Matching Algorithm (BMA) and others that recover MVs independently for individual MBs in an erroneous slice. We also propose an iterative DP process based on 8 × 8 pixels blocks to resolve finer motions (for 8 × 8, 8 × 16, and 16 × 8 pixels blocks) that will aid in the enhancement of reconstruction quality. Experiment results show that our algorithm outperforms the well-known BMA by up to 7.28 dB and the DMVE and another prior work by Qian by up to 1.0 dB at a packet loss rate of 15%. Subjective evaluation shows that our algorithm is especially promising in preserving line/curve features and motion details.

This paper addresses an error concealment technique, focusing on motion vector (MV) recovery for inter-coded frames, to improve video quality at decoder when video bit stream data are incurred transmission errors. The proposed algorithm considers slice (i.e., a row of macroblocks (MBs)) errors and uses DP (Dynamic Programming) optimization technique to estimate the lost MVs in a combined manner, differing from the traditional Boundary Matching Algorithm (BMA) which recovers MV independently for each erroneous MB. We also consider MV recovery for blocks of 8×8, 8×16, and 16×8 pixels (rather than 16×16 pixels MBs only) and apply an iterative DP process to refine the estimated results. Experimental results show that our algorithm outperforms the well-known BMA by up to 1.36 dB in PSNR and a newly published algorithm by up to 0.56 dB at a pack loss rate of up to 15%. Subjective evaluation shows that our algorithm takes the advantages of moderate speed and accurate recovery of contiguous line/curve features in images.