Error concealment for SNR scalable video coding in wireless communication

A mandatory requirement for future wireless multimedia communication is the availability of error resilient media codecs. This work discusses error detection and concealment techniques for a layered scalable video decoder, based on the SNR scalability option of the H.263 standard. A concealment method is proposed which uses error frequency and error location statistics for efficient hiding of transmission errors. The designed decoder allows error robust decoding with acceptable image quality even for highly corrupted video sequences up to bit error rates of 10, optimizing the image quality specifically for two-layer coded sequences. Simulation results show that scalable video coding outperforms single-layer coding under typical wireless conditions even if no priority or increased protection is applied to the base layer. The proposed two-layer concealment method yields a consistent improvement of up to 5 dB in image quality.