Error Concealment for the Scalable Extension of H.264/mpeg-4 Avc

Error concealment is of crucial importance when transmitting digital video material over error-prone channels. Indeed, loss of information can result in severe degradation of the video quality if precautions are not taken to contain the effect and propagation of errors. In this paper, we present an error concealment mechanism that supports quality scalability in packet-based transmission of video encoded with the recently developed scalable extension of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, also known as Scalable Video Coding (SVC). Experimental results show that our error concealment yields significantly better average video quality results than the non-normative errorconcealment tool of the reference SVC-codec. Also, the visual results demonstrate the importance of error concealment with support for quality scalability.