Efficient frame error concealment using bilateral motion estimation for low bit-rate video transmission

In low bit-rate video transmission, the payload of a single packet can often contain a whole coded frame due to the high compression ratio in both spatial and temporal domains. Thus, the loss of a single packet can lead to the loss of a whole video frame. In this paper, we propose a novel error concealment algorithm that can effectively reconstruct the lost frame and protect the quality of video streams from the degradation caused by propagation errors. The proposed algorithm employs a bilateral motion estimation scheme where the weighted sum of the received motion vectors (MVs) in the neighboring frames is utilized to construct the MV field for the concealed frame. Unlike the conventional algorithms, the proposed scheme does not produce any overlapped pixel and hole region in the reconstructed frame. The proposed algorithm can be applied not only to the case of single frame loss but also adaptively extended to the case of multiframe loss. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms other conventional techniques in terms of both peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) performance and subjective visual quality.