An effective error concealment scheme for heavily corrupted H.264/AVC videos based on Kalman filtering

Error concealment at the decoder side is an economical approach to ensuring an acceptable and stable video quality in case of packet erasure or loss, and thus, it has attracted considerable research and application interest. Relevant techniques usually employ the spatial or temporal correlation to recover the motion vectors (MVs) of the missing blocks, and interpolation, extrapolation, or boundary-matching schemes are usually effective. However, for heavily corrupted sequences, e.g., with block loss rate beyond 50 %, most methods might perform less satisfactorily. Inspired by the tracking efficiency of Kalman filter (KF), in the present work, we adopted it to predict the missing MVs, and the unpredicted ones (minority) were restored complementarily using a modified bilinear motion field interpolation (MFI) method. Since the KF prediction is independent of the loss rate, the present framework proves to be robust for heavily corrupted videos. Experimental results on typical sequences reveal that the proposed algorithm outperforms the boundary-matching algorithm embedded in the H.264/AVC reference code, the MFI and the MV extrapolation techniques in the literature.