Efficient temporal error concealment algorithm for H.264

Decoding errors in video communications caused by macroblock loss will propagate in both the temporal and spatial domains and will substantially reduce the video quality. The quality of reconstructed images can be enhanced by a temporal error concealment algorithm based on a fractional-pixel boundary-matching search for the newest international video coding standard H.264/AVC. The algorithm efficiently exploits the spatial correlation and the high precision of the motion vectors in H.264 to more accurately recover the lost motion vectors and improve the video quality. For video sequences with rapidly changing motions and various lost rates of inter-coded macroblocks, the proposed method constantly outperforms the traditional integer-pixel boundary-matching based algorithm and demonstrates fairly good robustness, with a 1.0～2.5 dB improvement in luminance PSNR compared to the traditional algorithm.