MPEG-2 error concealment based on block-matching principles

The MPEG-2 compression algorithm is very sensitive to channel disturbances due to the use of variable-length coding. A single bit error during transmi ssion leads to noticeable degradation of the decoded sequence quality, in t hat part or an entire slice information is lost until the nest resynchroniz ation point is reached, Error concealment (EC) methods, implemented at the decoder side, present one way of dealing with this problem. An error-concea lment scheme that is based on block-matching principles and spatio-temporal video redundancy is presented in this paper. Spatial information (for the first frame of the sequence or the nest scene) or temporal information (for the other frames) is used to reconstruct the corrupted regions. The concea lment strategy is embedded in the MPEG-2 decoder model in such a way that e rror concealment is applied after entire frame decoding. Its performance pr oves to be satisfactory for packet error rates (PER) ranging from 1% to 10% and for video sequences with different content and motion and surpasses th at of other EC methods under study.