Two-dimensional reversible data hiding-based approach for intra-frame error concealment in H.264/AVC

Highly compressed video bit-stream is extremely sensitive to transmission error. A novel two-dimensional reversible data hiding-based approach for intra-frame error concealment is proposed, which aims at improving video quality at decoder when video bit-stream incur transmission errors. The scheme involves embedding the motion vector (MV) of a macroblock (MB) into other MB within the same intra-frame, and extracting the embedded MV from the received video frame for reconstruction of the corrupted MB. Based on the distribution of the motion vector data and the characteristic of histogram shifting, a specific two-dimensional reversible data hiding mechanism is designed. Consequently, the distortion of the marked video can be controlled at a low level. Experimental results show that the damaged macroblocks can be recovered with a higher quality using the reversible data hiding methodology, as compared to the non-reversible data hiding method. Furthermore, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms some state-of-the-art reversible data hiding error concealment schemes in improving the perceptual quality.