A New Low-Complexity Error Concealment Method for Stereo Video Communication

The emerging popularity of three dimensional content has instigated the advances of stereo video coding and transmission techniques. According to the existing video compression standards, highly compressed stereo video bit streams are susceptible to transmission errors. As a consequence of the unavoidable spatial, temporal, and inter-view error propagation, the display quality is severely degraded at the receiver side. In this paper, to deal with the whole-frame loss of the right view in H.264-compressed stereo video bitstream transmission, a highly efficient perceptual whole-frame loss of right view error concealment algorithm is proposed with a fast error concealment strategy. Firstly, a fast error concealment strategy is presented, and an efficient image quality Index, gradient magnitude similarity deviation (GMSD) is extended to the concepts of temporal GMSD (TGMSD) and inter-view GMSD (VGMSD), respectively, to evaluate the perceptual quality of stereo image. Then, according to the temporal correlation of video sequences, macroblock (MB) prediction modes of the previous right-view frame are used as the MB prediction mode of the lost frame. Then, MBs in the previous frame of the lost frame are also matched, in both temporal and inter-view domains, to obtain the pixel-based TGMSD and VGMSD maps. Finally, for each MB in the lost right-view frame, its TGMSD and VGMSD values are calculated and compared to obtain the MB prediction mode, after which either motion compensation or disparity compensation can be quickly decided and used for resilience of the lost right-view frame. Experimental results show that compared with traditional error concealment algorithms, the proposed algorithm has superior subjective and objective qualities, and compared with the error concealment algorithms based on structure similarity, its error concealment time is reduced by about 40 % with almost same perceptual quality.