Error concealment based on motion vector recovery using optical flow fields

Compressed video bitstreams are very sensitive to transmission errors. If we lose packets or receive them with errors during transmission, not only the current frame will be corrupted, but also errors will propagate to succeeding frames. Therefore, we need various mechanisms to protect data and reduce the effects of transmission errors. Error concealment is a data recovery technique that enables the decoder to conceal the effects of transmission errors by predicting the lost or corrupted video data from the previously reconstructed error free information. Motion vector recovery and motion compensation with the estimated motion vector is a good approach to conceal the corrupted macroblock data. In this paper, we show that it is reasonable to use the estimated motion vector to conceal the lost macroblock by providing macroblock distortion models. After we propose a new motion vector recovery algorithm based on optical flow fields, we compare its performance to those of conventional error concealment methods.