Adaptive spatial concealment of damaged coded images

The transmission over error-prone networks of still images or videos coded by block-based techniques like JPEG and MPEG respectively, may lead to block loss degrading, particularly the visual quality of images. Working under this environment, such as wireless communication where retransmission may be not feasible, application of error concealment techniques is consequently required to reduce degradation caused by the missing information. This paper surveys algorithms for spatial error concealment and proposes an adaptive and effective method based on edge analysis that performs well in current situations where significant loss of information is present and the data of the past reference images are not also available. The proposed method and the reviewed algorithms were implemented, tested and compared. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms existing methods by up to 8.6 dB on average.