An H.264/AVC Error Concealment Technique Enhanced by Depth Correlation

The H.264 video coding standard, owing to its excellent compression efficiency, has become the key technology of many video applications. Coded video transmission over mobile channels or Internet, however, is vulnerable to data errors or packet losses. In this paper, we propose a new 11.264 error concealment technique that exploits the depth relevance between spatially or temporally neighboring blocks. At the decoder, the motion vectors gathered from received 11.264 slices are used to estimate the depth value of a lost block. The motion vectors, estimated from depth maps, are then added to the set of candidate motion vectors for concealing a lost block. The best motion vector is determined by the external boundary matching algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed method is effective in improving the quality of received video without generating and transmitting depth maps. Compared to the conventional method without incorporating the depth correlation, the proposed method increases the PSNR by 1 to 3 dBs.