Embedded Wavelet Video Coding
with Error Concealment

Abstract

We present an error-concealed embedded wavelet (ECEW) video coding system for transmission over Internet or wireless networks. This system consists of two types of frames: intra (I) frames and inter (P) frames. Inter frames are formed by variable block-size multiresolution motion estimation (MRME). Motion vectors are compressed by the arithmetic coding. The image data of intra frames and residual frames are coded by error-resilient embedded zerotree wavelet (ER-EZW). The ER-EZW partitions the wavelet coefficients into several groups and each group is coded independently. Therefore, errors are confined in a group. In EZW coding, any single error may result in a totally undecodable bitstream. To further reduce the error damage, we use the error concealment at the decoding end. In intra frames, we replace the erroneous wavelet coefficients by neighbors. In inter frames, we use the temporal replacement method which replaces error blocks of wavelet coefficients by the previous frame in the same position. Simulations show that the performance of ECEW with error concealment is superior to ECEW without error concealment by 7~8 dB at the error-rate of 10-3 in intra frames. The improvement still has 2~3 dB at the higher error-rate of 10-2 in inter frames.