ERROR-DETECTION AND CONCEALMENT WITH AN UNSUPERVISED MPEG2 VIDEO DECODER

MPEG2 is an international video coding standard for broad applications ranging from video conferencing to HDTV. In this paper we study the performance of an unsupervised MPEG2 decoder in the presence of bit errors and cell loss, where errors are detected by the decoder solely without requesting any error information from external devices. The technology behind the MPEG2 standard is described briefly. Differences between the MPEG1 and MPEG2 standards are addressed. Schemes to detect errors, based on decoding errors and standard semantics violations, are proposed, Implementation details of the unsupervised MPEG2 decoder are described as necessary to facilitate discussions of these schemes. Computer simulations are conducted for two video sequences with a variety of motions and scene contents to study the visual degradations caused by header information error, random bit error, and cell loss. It is shown that a simple error concealment scheme gives an overall visual quality acceptable to general viewers even under severe transmission error environments. (C) 1995 Bell Communications, Inc.