Temporal error concealment based on variable MB mode in H.264 video transmission over error-prone channels

New coding standard H.264 supports motion compensation block sizes ranging from 16x16 to 4x4, therefore the original corrupted macroblock (MB) may be split into MB partitions or MB sub-partitions depending on MB mode, and each of the partitions or sub-partitions has its own motion vector (MV). For nature video, in two successive frames, the two motion compensated areas are correlative both in MB mode and theirs MVs. We propose a new temporal error concealment algorithm based on variable MB mode. It estimates corrupted MB mode using backward motion tracking (BMT) firstly and recover MVs of the corrupted MB mode adaptively. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing MV recovery methods for error concealment at different block loss rates (BLRs).