Temporal Error Concealment Using Self-Organizing Map*

Abstract

The performance of MPEG video transmission over error-prone channels is limited by the channel noise. An efficient error concealment (EC) scheme is essential for diminishing the impact of transmission errors in a compressed video. A number of error concealment (EC) techniques have been developed to combat the transmission errors. However, the techniques are always inefficient when the motions of object in a video are fast or complex. In this paper, a novel adaptive EC algorithm is proposed to conceal the error for block-based image coding systems by using neural network (NN) techniques in the spatial domain. In the proposed algorithm, the self-organizing map (SOM) is used for estimating and reconstructing the motion vectors of damaged blocks. The SOM has a great capacity for visualizing and interpreting high-dimensional data sets. Computer simulation results show that the visual quality and the PSNR evaluation of reconstructed frames are significantly improved by using the proposed EC algorithm. From the experimental results, we find that the proposed algorithm is expected to be a useful EC algorithm for motion vector compressed video in error-prone networks.