Optimization of spatial error concealment for H.264 featuring low complexity

Transmission of highly compressed video bitstreams can result in packet erasures when channel status is unfavorable. Spatial error concealment (SEC) techniques are very useful in the recovery of impaired video sequences, especially in the presence of scene changes, irregular motion, and appearance or disappearance of objects. As errors occur in the first frame, the corrupted MBs must be recovered by utilizing SEC schemes in order to prevent the propagation of errors to the succeeding inter-coded frames. We propose two SEC methods; one conceals the variances of the different kinds of damaged Macroblocks (MBs) targeted at any condition, and the other is speed-up which utilizes a H.264 coding tool, directional spatial intra prediction, in order to conceal the entire spectrum of damaged MBs targeted at intra-coded block(s). The experimental results show that when compared to other state of the art methods, our proposed SEC techniques significantly improve video quality up to 3.62-4.22 dB while reducing computational complexity.