With the ubiquitous application of Internet and wireless networks, H.264 video communication becomes more and more common. However, due to the high-efficiently predictive coding and the variable length entropy coding, it is more sensitive to transmission errors. The current error concealment (EC) scheme, which utilizes the spatial and temporal correlations to conceal the corrupted region, produces unsatisfied boundary artifacts. In this paper, first we propose variable block size error concealment (VBSEC) scheme inspired by variable block size motion estimation (VBSME) in H.264. This scheme provides four EC modes and four sub-block partitions. The whole corrupted macro-block (MB) will be divided into variable block size adaptively according to the actual motion. More precise motion vectors (MV) will be predicted for each sub-block. Then MV refinement (MVR) scheme is proposed to refine the MV of the heterogeneous sub-block by utilizing three step search (TSS) algorithm adaptively. Both VBSEC and MVR are based on our directional spatio-temporal boundary matching algorithm (DSTBMA). By utilizing these schemes, we can reconstruct the corrupted MB in the inter frame more accurately. The experimental results show that our proposed scheme can obtain better objective and subjective EC quality, respectively compared with the boundary matching algorithm (BMA) adopted in the JM11.0 reference software, spatio-temporal boundary matching algorithm (STBMA) and other comparable EC methods.

A temporal error concealment algorithm for the block-based video coder has been proposed. The concept of block overlapping is adopted to conceal the erroneous blocks, and the recovered pixels are estimated by the weighted sum from the overlapping. The overlapping weighting matrix has been carefully selected in order to fully exploit the spatial-temporal correlation between boundary blocks and the lost block. Furthermore, the motion vector for the lost block has been recovered by considering the best results for the overlapping. The experimental results are shown by integrating our algorithm into the H.263+ coder.

The H.264 standard allows each macroblock to have up to sixteen motion vectors, four reference frames, and a macroblock mode. Exploiting this feature, we present an efficient temporal error concealment algorithm for H.264-coded video. The proposed method turns out to show good performance compared with conventional approaches.

Error concealment is an essential part of reliable video communication systems because transmission errors are inevitable even when the coded bitstream is highly protected. The problem of temporal EC can be factored into two parts regarding candidate motion vectors (MVs) employed and the matching criterion to evaluate the fitness of each candidate MV. In order to obtain more faithful EC results, this paper proposes a novel iterative EC algorithm, in which an efficient way to provide candidate MVs and a new fitness measure are presented. The proposed approach for candidate MVs systematically utilizes all the available neighboring MVs by exploiting a well-known spatiotemporal correlation of block MVs. Also, in order to remove the dependency of a damaged block's quality of concealment on the already concealed adjacent blocks, we develope a new matching criterion. The objective of the proposed fitness measure is to minimize the total boundary matching errors induced by the whole corrupted blocks. Simulations performed using an H.263 codec demonstrate a significant improvement on the subjective and objective concealed video qualities, especially when the corrupted area is wider than a single row of coding blocks.

The performance of conventional error concealment (EC) is significantly affected by the method of selecting candidate motion vectors (MVs). In order to obtain more robust EC results, this letter proposes a new and efficient way to choose candidate MVs. The proposed approach systematically utilizes available neighboring MVs by exploiting a well-known spatiotemporal correlation of block MVs. Through extensive simulations with H.263, this letter demonstrates that the proposed candidate MVs provide superior concealed video quality in comparison to the best results of other existing techniques.

The applicability of a boundary matching technique is presented for reconstructing the refractive-index profile of a circularly symmetric cylinder from the measurement of the scattered wave when the cylinder is illuminated by an H-polarized plane wave. The algorithm of reconstruction is based on an iterative procedure of matching the scattered wave calculated from a certain refractive-index distribution with the measured scattered-wave. The limits of reconstruction for strongly inhomogeneous lossless and lossy cylinders are numerically shown through computer simulations under noisy environment, and are compared with those in the E-wave case.

We present a novel algorithm to reconstruct the refractive-index profile of a circularly symmetric object from measurements of the electromagnetic field scattered when the object is illuminated by a plane wave. The reconstruction algorithm is besed on an iterative procedure of matching the scattered field calculated from a certain refractive-index distribution with the measured scattered field on the boundary of the object. In order to estimate the convergence of the reconstruction, the mean square error between the calculated and measured scattered fields is introduced. It is shown through reconstructing several examples of lossy dielectric cylinders that the algorithm is quite stable and is applicable to high-contrasty models in situations where the Born approximation is not valid.