Adaptive interpolation for error concealment in H.264 using directional histograms

Abstract

Error Concealment methods for Intra frames in H.264 reconstruct the missing macroblock by computing weighted average of the boundary pixels of the neighboring blocks. However, the simple averaging of pixel values leads to blurring and degrades the picture quality severely. To solve this problem, an adaptive interpolation considering directions of neighboring blocks is proposed. Directional interpolation is adaptively chosen by a threshold computed from the distribution of local directions in areas around the lost block. Experiments show improvement of picture quality of about 0.5-2.0 dB compared to existing methods. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.