Embedded wavelet video coding with error concealment

We present an error-concealed embedded wavelet (ECEW) video coding system for transmission over Internet or wireless networks. This system consists of two types of frames: intra (I) frames and inter, or predicted (P), frames. Inter frames are constructed by the residual frames formed by variable block-size multiresolution motion estimation (MRME). Motion vectors are compressed by arithmetic coding. The image data of intra frames and residual frames are coded by error-resilient embedded zerotree wavelet (ER-EZW) coding. The ER-EZW coding partitions the wavelet coefficients into several groups and each group is coded independently. Therefore, the error propagation effect resulting from an error is only confined in a group. In EZW coding any single error may result in a totally undecodable bitstream. To further reduce the error damage, we use the error concealment at the decoding end. In intra frames, the erroneous wavelet coefficients are replaced by neighbors. In inter frames, erroneous blocks of wavelet coefficients are replaced by data from the previous frame. Simulations show that the performance of ECEW is superior to ECEW without error concealment by 7 to approximately 8 dB at the error-rate of 10-3 in intra frames. The improvement still has 2 to approximately 3 dB at a higher error-rate of 10-2 in inter frames.