Spatio-temporal boundary matching algorithm for temporal error concealment

In this paper, a novel temporal error concealment algorithm, called Spatio-Temporal Boundary Matching Algorithm (STBMA), is proposed to recover the information lost in the video transmission. Different from the classical Boundary Matching Algorithm (BMA), which just considers the spatial smoothness property, the proposed algorithm introduces a new distortion function to exploit both the spatial and temporal smoothness properties to recover the lost motion vector (MV) from candidates. The new distortion function involves two terms: spatial distortion term and temporal distortion term. Since both the spatial and temporal smoothness properties are involved, the proposed method can better minimize the distortion of the recovered block and recover more accurate MV. The proposed algorithm has been tested on H.264 reference software JM 9.0. The experimental results demonstrate the proposed algorithm can obtain better PSNR performance and visual quality, compared with BMA which is adopted in H.264.