Flexible error concealment for H.264 based on directional interpolation

The losses of packets cannot be avoided if real-time video is transported over error prone environments. To conceal missing parts of video pictures, the spatial and temporal correlation feature of natural video sequences is used. However,, in some cases - for instance in case of a scene change - there is no temporal correlation available and thus spatial error concealment has to be used. This article proposes a flexible spatial error concealment based on directional interpolation method that performs well also if only two neighboring boundaries are used as common for H.264 spatially Predicted frames. The proposed method was implemented and tested in a H.264 codec together with other error concealment methods to evaluate their performance.