A robust error concealment technique using data hiding for image and video transmission over lossy channels

A robust error concealment scheme using data hiding which aims at achieving high perceptual quality of images and video at the end-user despite channel losses is proposed. The scheme involves embedding a low-resolution version of each image or video frame into itself using spread-spectrum watermarking, extracting the embedded watermark from the received video frame, and using it as a reference for reconstruction of the parent image or frame, thus detecting and concealing the transmission errors. Dithering techniques have been used to obtain a binary watermark from the low-resolution version of the image/video frame. Multiple copies of the dithered watermark are embedded in frequencies in a specific range to make it more robust to channel errors. It is shown experimentally that, based on the frequency selection and scaling factor variation, a high-quality watermark can be extracted from a low-quality lossy received image/video frame. Furthermore, the proposed technique is compared to its two-part variant where the low-resolution version is encoded and transmitted as side information instead of embedding it. Simulation results show that the proposed concealment technique using data hiding outperforms existing approaches in improving the perceptual quality, especially in the case of higher loss probabilities.