Error resilient video coding using virtual reference picture

Due to widely used motion-compensated prediction coding, errors propagate along decoded video sequence and may result in severe quality degradation. Various methods have been reported to address this problem based on the common idea of diversifying prediction references. In this paper, we present an alternative way of concealing the references pictures errors. A generated virtual picture is used as a reference instead of an actual sequence picture in the temporal prediction. The virtual reference picture is generated in a way to filter damaged parts of previously decoded pictures so that the decoder can still get a clean reference picture in case of errors. Coding efficiency is effected due to the fact that the virtual reference is less correlated to the currently encoded picture. The simulations on H.264 codec have shown quality improvement of the proposed method over intra-coded macroblock refreshment. It can be used on any motion-compensated video codec to combat channel errors.