Projection Onto Convex Sets with Watermarking for Error Concealment

Transmission of images and video over unreliable channels produces visual artifacts due to either loss or corruption of bit streams. Error concealment schemes aim at reducing such degradation and improving the visual quality. Error concealment schemes usu

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Abstract. Transmission of images and video over unreliable channels produces visual artifacts due to either loss or corruption of bit streams. Error concealment schemes aim at reducing such degradation and improving the visual quality. Error concealment schemes usually conceal errors of a specific type. This points towards the possibility of combining more than one scheme, for efficient error concealment and better visual effects. In this paper, we propose a scheme for error concealment using a combination of watermarking and Projection Onto Convex Sets (POCS). Watermarking an image using the information derived from the host data itself conceals errors initially and those which are prominent even after this stage are concealed through POCS. The proposed method can be used for concealing errors in images and intra coded video by preserving average values through watermarking and edge information through POCS. Simulation results of POCS, watermarking and watermarking with POCS are given in the paper to show the advantage of combining both the methods.

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Introduction

Data transmitted over channels are vulnerable to transmission errors. Imperfect transmission of block coded images and video results in loss of blocks. Error correction, error control and error concealment techniques have been developed for reducing these visual artifacts [1]. Error concealment techniques reduce image distortions through post processing at the decoder side. Hence error concealment techniques do not have access to the original information and are usually based on estimation and interpolation procedures that do not require additional information from the encoder. Digital watermarking is basically a means of inserting some content into the original data which can be later recovered to prove authentication or copyright. Of late it has also been proposed for error concealment of images and video [2]. In this case some important information derived from the image itself is chosen as the watermark and is retrieved at the decoder as in the case of a blind watermarking scheme and used for concealing errors. The scheme proposed in [3] conceals block errors of various sizes by replacing the lost blocks with their average value. This is performed by embedding some important information A. Ghosh, R.K. De, and S.K. Pal (Eds.): PReMI 2007, LNCS 4815, pp. 119–127, 2007. c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007 

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extracted from the original image itself to introduce sufficient redundancy in the transmitted image. When there are too many losses, blockiness may become visible and some blocks may remain unconcealed. Thus it would be a good idea to combine this method with another method to remove this blockiness. Projection onto Convex Sets (POCS) [4] utilizes correlated edge information from local neighborhood in images and intra frames of video to restore missing blocks. It is an iterative algorithm satisfying spatial domain and spectral domain constraints. Thus POCS method preserves edge, but is computationally complex and non real