Adaptive Spatial Error Concealment Technique Based on Edge Analysis

Compressed bit streams are, in general, very sensitive to channel errors. For instance, a single bit error in a coded video bit stream may cause severe degradation on picture quality. When bit errors occur during transmission and cannot be corrected by an error correction scheme, error concealment is needed to conceal the corrupted image at the receiver. Error concealment algorithms attempt to repair damaged portions of the picture by exploiting both the spatial and the temporal redundancies in the received and reconstructed video signal. This paper surveys algorithms for spatial error concealment and discuss an adaptive directional interpolation method based on edge analysis that performs well in current situations where significant loss of information is present and the data of the past reference images are not also available. The adaptive directional interpolation method and the reviewed algorithms were implemented, tested and compared. Experimental results show that the adaptive directional interpolation approach outperforms existing methods.