Inpainting-based error concealment for low-delay video communication

Distributed Video Coding (DVC) is a new paradigm for video compression based on the information theoretical results of Slepian and Wolf (SW), and Wyner and Ziv (WZ). While conventional coding has a rigid complexity allocation as most of the complex tasks are performed at the encoder side, DVC enables a flexible complexity allocation between the encoder and the decoder. The most novel and interesting case is low complexity encoding and complex decoding, which is the opposite of conventional coding. While the latter is suitable for applications where the cost of the decoder is more critical than the encoder's one, DVC opens the door for a new range of applications where low complexity encoding is required and the decoder's complexity is not critical. This is interesting with the deployment of small and battery-powered multimedia mobile devices all around in our daily life. Further, since DVC operates as a reversed-complexity scheme when compared to conventional coding, DVC also enables the interesting scenario of low complexity encoding and decoding between two ends by transcoding between DVC and conventional coding. More specifically, low complexity encoding is possible by DVC at one end. Then, the resulting stream is decoded and conventionally re-encoded to enable low complexity decoding at the other end. Multiview video is attractive for a wide range of applications such as free viewpoint television, which is a system that allows viewing the scene from a viewpoint chosen by the viewer. Moreover, multiview can be beneficial for monitoring purposes in video surveillance. The increased use of multiview video systems is mainly due to the improvements in video technology and the reduced cost of cameras. While a multiview conventional codec will try to exploit the correlation among the different cameras at the encoder side, DVC allows for separate encoding of correlated video sources. Therefore, DVC requires no communication between the cameras in a multiview scenario. This is an advantage since communication is time consuming (i.e. more delay) and requires complex networking. Another appealing feature of DVC is the fact that it is based on a statistical framework. Moreover, DVC behaves as a natural joint source-channel coding solution. This results in an improved error resilience performance when compared to conventional coding. Further, DVC-based scalable codecs do not require a deterministic knowledge of the lower layers. In other words, the enhancement layers are completely independent from the base layer codec. This is called the codec-independent scalability feature, which offers a high flexibility in the way the various layers are distributed in a network. This thesis addresses the following topics: First, the theoretical foundations of DVC as well as the practical DVC scheme used in this research are presented. The potential applications for DVC are also outlined. DVC-based schemes use conventional coding to compress parts of the data, while the rest is compressed in a distributed fashion. Thus, different conventional codecs are studied in this research as they are compared in terms of compression efficiency for a rich set of sequences. This includes fine tuning the compression parameters such that the best performance is achieved for each codec. Further, DVC tools for improved Side Information (SI) and Error Concealment (EC) are introduced for monoview DVC using a partially decoded frame. The improved SI results in a significant gain in reconstruction quality for video with high activity and motion. This is done by re-estimating the erroneous motion vectors using the partially decoded frame to improve the SI quality. The latter is then used to enhance the reconstruction of the finally decoded frame. Further, the introduced spatio-temporal EC improves the quality of decoded video in the case of erroneously received packets, outperforming both spatial and temporal EC. Moreover, it also outperforms error-concealed conventional coding in different modes. Then, multiview DVC is studied in terms of SI generation, which differentiates it from the monoview case. More specifically, different multiview prediction techniques for SI generation are described and compared in terms of prediction quality, complexity and compression efficiency. Further, a technique for iterative multiview SI is introduced, where the final SI is used in an enhanced reconstruction process. The iterative SI outperforms the other SI generation techniques, especially for high motion video content. Finally, fusion techniques of temporal and inter-view side informations are introduced as well, which improves the performance of multiview DVC over monoview coding. DVC is also used to enable scalability for image and video coding. Since DVC is based on a statistical framework, the base and enhancement layers are completely independent, which is an interesting property called codec-independent scalability. Moreover, the introduced DVC scalable schemes show a good robustness to errors as the quality of decoded video steadily decreases with error rate increase. On the other hand, conventional coding exhibits a cliff effect as the performance drops dramatically after a certain error rate value. Further, the issue of privacy protection is addressed for DVC by transform domain scrambling, which is used to alter regions of interest in video such that the scene is still understood and privacy is preserved as well. The proposed scrambling techniques are shown to provide a good level of security without impairing the performance of the DVC scheme when compared to the one without scrambling. This is particularly attractive for video surveillance scenarios, which is one of the most promising applications for DVC. Finally, a practical DVC demonstrator built during this research is described, where the main requirements as well as the observed limitations are presented. Furthermore, it is defined in a setup being as close as possible to a complete real application scenario. This shows that it is actually possible to implement a complete end-to-end practical DVC system relying only on realistic assumptions. Even though DVC is inferior in terms of compression efficiency to the state of the art conventional coding for the moment, strengths of DVC reside in its good error resilience properties and the codec-independent scalability feature. Therefore, DVC offers promising possibilities for video compression with transmission over error-prone environments requirement as it significantly outperforms conventional coding in this case.

Error concealment at the decoder side is an economical approach to ensuring an acceptable and stable video quality in case of packet erasure or loss, and thus, it has attracted considerable research and application interest. Relevant techniques usually employ the spatial or temporal correlation to recover the motion vectors (MVs) of the missing blocks, and interpolation, extrapolation, or boundary-matching schemes are usually effective. However, for heavily corrupted sequences, e.g., with block loss rate beyond 50 %, most methods might perform less satisfactorily. Inspired by the tracking efficiency of Kalman filter (KF), in the present work, we adopted it to predict the missing MVs, and the unpredicted ones (minority) were restored complementarily using a modified bilinear motion field interpolation (MFI) method. Since the KF prediction is independent of the loss rate, the present framework proves to be robust for heavily corrupted videos. Experimental results on typical sequences reveal that the proposed algorithm outperforms the boundary-matching algorithm embedded in the H.264/AVC reference code, the MFI and the MV extrapolation techniques in the literature.

In this paper, a prescription-based error concealment (PEC) method is proposed. PEC relies on pre-analyses of the concealment error image (CEI) for I-frames and the optimal error concealment scheme for P-frames at encoder side. CEI is used to enhance the image quality at decoder side after error concealment (by spatial interpolation or zero motion) of the corrupted intra-coded MBs. A set of pre-selected error concealment methods is evaluated for each corrupted inter-coded MB to determine the optimal one for the decoder. Both the CEI and the scheme indices are considered as the prescriptions for decoder and transmitted along with the video bit stream based on a reversible data embedding technique. Experiments show that the proposed method is capable of achieving PSNR improvement of up to 1.48 dB, at a considerable bit-rate, when the packet loss rate is 20%

We use particle filtering for correcting the erroneous motion vectors (MVs), which are derived from the boundary matching algorithm (BMA) in packet video communications. Assuming a two-state Markov channel model for transmission, the error of the extracted MVs by BMA is shown to be modeled by the Gaussian mixture distribution. Formulating the problem in the state space, we deploy particle filtering for denoising the erroneous MVs. The main challenge of using particle filters is high computational complexity that is directly related to the number of particles. The proposed particle filtering scheme is efficient even if the number of particles is decreased. Experimental results are provided to show the efficiency of this filtering approach compared to a recent scheme based on Kalman filtering. The experiments show meaningful increase in the quality of the recovered video sequences in terms of PSNR up to 3 dB compared with the other error concealment techniques. Also, the computational complexity of the proposed scheme is discussed.

We propose an error concealment method for robust video transmission based on watermarking technique. In this method, the motion vector information is used as the watermark and embedded in the transform coefficients before quantization. A proper embedding algorithm is designed with the characteristics of the video coder taken into consideration, so that the embedding watermark has little influence on the video quality and the coding efficiency. At the decoder, the extracted watermark is used to effectively detect errors and restore the corrupted motion vectors. Then the restored motion vectors are utilized in error concealment. Simulation results demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method in error prone environment. The proposed method is applicable to all the block-transform based video coding schemes.

Confident Recovery for Lost Motion Vectors in Video Transmission

A new error concealment algorithm based on average motion vector (AVMV) method is proposed as a post-processing tool at the decoder side for recovering the lost blocks and their motion vectors as well incurred during the video transmission. In our proposed scheme, LOG operator is used to detect the texture of the blocks around the lost block and find the more precise estimation of the motion vectors, so as to improve the AVMV method. Simulation results show that the proposed method can recover the higher quality image in different rates of lost block, comparing to the existing traditional concealment algorithms.

In this paper, a complexity-balancing algorithm is proposed for distributed video coding based on entropy coding. In order to reduce complexity of DVC-based decoders, the proposed method employs an entropy coder instead of channel coders and the complexity-balancing method is designed to improve RD performance with minimal computational complexity. The proposed method performs motion estimation in the decoder side and transmits the estimated motion vectors to the encoder. The proposed encoder can perform more accurate refinement using the transmitted motion vectors from the decoder. During the motion refinement, the optimal predicted motion vectors are decided by the received motion vector and the predicted motion vectors and complexity load of block is allocated by adjusting the search range based on the difference between the received motion vector and the predicted motion vectors. The computational complexity of the proposed encoder is decreased 11.9% compared to the H.264/AVC encoder and that of the proposed decoder are reduced 99% compared to the conventional DVC decoder.

To transmit video bit stream over low bandwidth such as wireless channel, high compression algorithm like H.264 codec is exploited. In transmitting high compressed video bit-stream over low bandwidth, packet loss causes severe degradation in image quality. In this paper, a new algorithm for recovery of missing or erroneous motion vector is proposed. Considering that the missing or erroneous motion vectors in blocks are closely correlated with those of neighboring blocks. Motion vector of neighboring blocks are clustered according to average linkage algorithm clustering and a representative value for each cluster is determined to obtain the candidate motion vector sets. As a result, simulation results show that the proposed method dramatically improves processing time compared to existing H.264/AVC. Also the proposed method is similar to existing H.264/AVC in terms of visual quality.

Error concealment is a well-known technique to improve reproduced picture quality in cases which parts of the coded picture are not available at a decoder for reconstruction. The conventional error concealment methods generally make use of the correlation between a damaged marcoblock and its adjacent macroblocks in the same frame and/or the previous frame. However, performance results of concealment methods are different each other and dependent on how much damaged frames and macroblocks are correlated to surrounding ones temporally and spatially. Moreover, most of them can not conceal effectively the consecutively damaged frames or macro blocks caused by wireless bursty packet loss features, since motion vectors and correlation information between the damaged images are already destroyed. The proposed error concealment aware error resilient video coding is a new method which has an intelligent error concealment selector by using pre-estimation technique of the possibly damaged motion vectors at the encoder. The method recommends the best error concealment per macroblock by transmitting additionally its error concealment selection codes to the decoder. The chosen error concealment helps to conceal the damaged MB at the decoder even when losses of frames are bursty. The experimental results show the substantial effectiveness to improve video quality at the cost of a little bit overhead at the transmitted bit streams.

Motion-vector-based error concealment algorithms recover lost blocks by motion compensation with the estimated motion vectors. Traditionally, the estimated motion vectors for the lost block are derived by the direct usage of the neighboring available motion vectors. In this work, the residual signal in a block encoded in the video bitstream is used to measure the reliability of the corresponding motion vector. The residual information is applied to weight the neighboring available motion vectors differently, to further improve a newly proposed mathematical formulation between encoded motion vectors and extrapolated motion vectors. The proposed error concealment method using the residual information outperforms a state-of-the-art error concealment algorithm by up to 2.12 dB in sequence PSNR, and outperforms a classic DMVE method by up to 8.27 dB.

Error concealment at a decoder is an efficient method to reduce the degradation of visual quality caused by channel errors. In this paper, we propose a novel spatio-temporal error concealment algorithm based on the spatial-temporal fading (STF) scheme which has been recently introduced. Although STF achieves good performance for the error concealment, several drawbacks including blurring still remain in the concealed blocks. To alleviate these drawbacks, in the proposed method, hybrid approaches with adaptive weights are proposed. First, the boundary matching algorithm and the decoder motion vector estimation which are well-known temporal error concealment methods are adaptively combined to compensate for the defect of each other. Then, an edge preserved method is utilized to reduce the blurring effects caused by the bilinear interpolation for spatial error concealment. Finally, two concealed results obtained by the hybrid spatial and temporal error concealment are pixel-wisely blended with adaptive weights. Experimental results exhibit that the proposed method outperforms conventional methods including STF in terms of the PSNR performance as well as subjective visual quality, and the computational complexity of the proposed method is similar to that of STF.

As the newest video coding standard, H.264/AVC adopts the high-efficiently predictive coding and variable length entropy coding to achieve high compression efficiency. On the other side, transmission errors become the major problem faced by video broadcasting service providers. Error concealment (EC) here is adopted to handle slices with huge conjunctive corrupted areas inside. Considering error propagation from corrupted slice to succeeding ones is the key factor affecting the video quality, this paper proposes a novel temporal EC scheme including the bi-direction motion vector (MV) retrieval method and an adaptive EC ordering basing on it. Background and motional steady shift part of slice will be given top and second priority, respectively. Combined with our proposed improved boundary matching algorithm (IBMA) which provides more accurate distortion function, experiments results show that our proposal achieves better performance under different error rate channel, compared with EC algorithm adopted in H.264 reference software.

Error protection and concealment of motion vectors are of prime concern when video is transmitted over variable-bandwidth error-prone channels, such as wireless channels. In this paper, we investigate the influence of corrupted motion vectors in video coding based on motion-compensated temporal filtering, and develop various error protection and concealment mechanisms for this class of codecs. The experimental results show that our proposed motion vector coding technique significantly increases the robustness against transmission errors and generates performance gains of up to 7 dB compared with the original coding technique at the cost of less than 4% in terms of rate. It is also shown that our proposed spatial error-concealment mechanism leads to additional performance gains of up to 4 dB.

The three-dimensional video (3DV) is composed of variable-length stream sequences captured via diversified cameras surrounding an object. Thus, it is an urgent task to accomplish sufficient encoding to be compatible with incoming bandwidth demands, while achieving a recommended 3DV reception performance. In the 3DV compression framework, the lost macro-blocks (MBs) might propagate into the following frames and the adjoining views. Therefore, it is obligatory to avoid error propagation by concealing the corrupted MBs at the decoder through the utilization of appropriate post-processing error concealment (EC) techniques. The existing EC algorithms fundamentally exploit the temporal, inter-view, and spatial matching within the 3DV frames and views to reconstruct the disparity vectors (DVs) and motion vectors (MVs) of the corrupted MBs. Unluckily, in the state of high severe corruptions and heavily erroneous MBs, these concealment algorithms are predominantly unreliable and might give unreliable 3DV quality. Thence, in this work, we suggest the utilization of the outer block boundary matching algorithm to estimate the MVs and the directional interpolation EC algorithm to estimate the DVs of the erroneous MBs. After that, the Bayesian Kalman filter (BKF) is employed because of its efficiency to filter out the inherent errors in the previously predicted DVs and MVs to accomplish better 3D video performance. Experimental results on standard 3DV sequences demonstrate that the suggested BKF-based EC scheme is more powerful with heavy losses. It subjectively and objectively outperforms the traditional concealment techniques at severely random and bursty packet loss rates (PLRs).