A novel error concealment method for images using watermarking in error-prone channels

In this paper, we propose a new error concealment method for covering up the high packet losses of an original image after its transmission through an error-prone channel. Error-concealment techniques provide a simple framework to compensate these distortions without incurring additional delays and wasting bandwidth resources which are crucial for real-time applications over networks with limited resources. Unfortunately, most of the existing error-concealment techniques work only if the packet losses are smaller than a threshold and/or they are uniformly distributed. Utilizing data hiding techniques is a potential approach to overcome this restriction. We investigated an error concealment technique utilizing discrete wavelet transform (DWT) for embedding macroblock-based BNM (best-neighborhood-matching) information into the original image in order to utilize spatial redundancy. We propose that this technique can be implemented for error-prone channels to combat such degradations in a backward-compatible scheme. We show that the proposed error concealment technique is a promising one, especially for the erroneous channels causing a wider range of packet losses, at the expense of some degradation In the perceptual quality of the original image.