H.264/AVC error concealment for DVB-H video transmission

Abstract

Digital Video Broadcasting for handheld terminals (DVB-H) is a broadcast system designed for high-speed data transmission in highly dispersive mobile channel conditions. This so-called "TV on Mobile" technology uses the Internet Protocol (IP) to carry highly compressed audio/video information; the ITU-T H.264 Advanced Video Coding (AVC) standard has been selected by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) as the video compression enabling technology. This choice, motivated by the good trade-off between coding efficiency and video quality, provides the further benefit of robustness against loss of parts of the received stream. As a matter of fact, transmission errors on the mobile channel can lead to IP datagram corruptions or losses; if not recovered by the prescribed Forward Error Correction (FEC) techniques, they can determine audio and video quality degradation. To face video degradation, Error Concealment strategies at the decoder can be efficiently tailored to the available hardware and computational resources of the receiving device, and do not require any changes in the encoding technique, nor any redundancy added to the transmitted data. Error Concealment refers to postprocessing techniques employed by the video decoder, which basically exploits the remaining spatial and temporal redundancy in the received video data to compensate the lost information. © 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.