Selective block matching for error concealment in video system

Abstract

This paper presents a novel error concealment algorithm, namely selective block matching algorithm (SBMA). We incorporate a modified version of spatial interpolation (SI), side match algorithm (SMA), and median filtering to achieve smooth restoration of lost blocks. SBMA is comprised of four major parts: (1) a median filter (MF) estimating the four boundary vectors in the lost block, (2) selective spatial interpolation (SSI) concealing certain pixels in the lost block by a simple interpolation using four pixels of the filtered boundary vectors, (3) the selective block matching (SBM) step finding the recovery block in a well-defined search window that has maximum similarity to the block containing the filtered boundary vectors and concealed pixels, (4) the step of selective recovery (SR) replacing the pixels not estimated in (1) and (2) with pixels at corresponding coordinates in the recovery block. The proposed SBMA can recover any type of frame in the video system, and does not rely on the encoder to provide additional information. More significantly, it can be easily implemented for any encoded bit-stream. Experimental results have shown that SBMA can achieve satisfactory smoothing results in the recovered frames.