Abstract: To improve the decoded quality of videos when bit stream data incur transmission errors, an effective temporal error concealment algorithm is proposed for H.264 coded video. It uses not only motion vectors and reference frames but the modes of macroblocks adjacent to the lost macroblock as well. Each lost macroblock is concealed on the basis of different block sizes depending on the modes of neighboring macroblocks. Then the motion vector with the minimum value of external boundary match distortion is selected for each block from a list of motion vector candidates. Finally, motion estimation is employed to more accurately recover the lost motion vectors and improve the video quality. For video sequences with different motions and various lost rates of inter-coded macroblocks, experimental results show the proposed technique can obtain a better video quality than conventional temporal concealment techniques and the computational complexity is very low.

Key words: temporal error concealment, H.264, external boundary matching, macroblock mode, motion estimation