Hybrid temporal error concealment methods for block-based compressed video transmission

Boundary matching algorithm (BMA) and decoder motion vector estimation (DMVE) are two well-known temporal error concealment methods using the matching-based approach. In these two methods, the motion vector of each missing block is estimated by choosing one among candidate motion vectors which minimizes a sum of absolute differences (SAD) between boundary pixels of the corrupted macroblock. In general, the performance of DMVE is better than that of BMA. However, depending on the location or pattern of the corrupted block, BMA produces higher visual quality than DMVE. In this paper, we propose two types of hybrid error concealment methods; switching method and blending method. The switching method chooses one of two results obtained by BMA and DMVE based on the normalized SAD values. In the blending method, the weighted sum of the results concealed by the aforementioned two methods is utilized to improve the performance of error concealment. In order to reduce blocking artifacts further, the modified overlapped-block motion compensation is adaptively applied to the concealed blocks. Simulation results show that the proposed methods outperform other techniques in terms of subjective visual quality as well as PSNR performance. Index Terms--Blocking artifact reduction, switching and blending, temporal error concealment, video transmission.