Error Control and Concealment for Video Communication: A Review

The problem of error control and concealment in video communication is becoming increasingly important because of the growing interest in video delivery over unreliable channels such as wireless networks and the Internet. This paper reviews the techniques that have been developed for error control and concealment in the past 10–15 years. These techniques are described in three categories according to the roles that the encoder and decoder play in the underlying approaches. Forward error concealment includes methods that add redundancy at the source end to enhance error resilience of the coded bit streams. Error concealment by postprocessing refers to operations at the decoder to recover the damaged areas based on characteristics of image and video signals. Last, interactive error concealment covers techniques that are dependent on a dialogue between the source and destination. Both current research activities and practice in international standards are covered.