A New Error Concealment Technique for Video Frames Using a RBF Neural Network

Transmission of compressed video over error prone channels may result in packet losses, which can degrade the image quality. Error concealment (EC) is an effective approach to reduce the degradation caused by the missed information. The conventional temporal EC techniques are always inefficient when the motions of the video object are irregular. In this paper, in order to overcome this problem, an efficient temporal EC approach to conceal the macroblock error for video coding systems is proposed. The proposed EC method employs a RBF neural network to estimate the motion vectors of the damaged macroblocks. RBF estimator is used only for areas of the fast motions, which reduces computation complexity. Because the neural networks have a great capacity for visualizing and interpreting high-dimensional data sets, the estimation model proposed herein can exploit the nonlinearity property of the neural networks to estimate lost motion vectors more accurately. Simulation results show that the proposed technique enhances both subjective and objective quality of reconstructed frames, such as the average PSNR increases about 1.5 dB compared to the BMA method for the test video sequences in some frames.