Quality assessment and error concealment for SVC transmission over unreliable channels

Scalable video coding (SVC) has aroused a wide interest in the areas of video coding and transmission technology, since it provides desirable features for heterogeneous error-prone network environments. The layered video structure allows not only adaptation to the available bandwidth but also a device adaptation capability via multiple decodable sub-streams. In this paper, we focus on SVC Medium- Grain Scalability (MGS) and investigate the end user's quality of experience (QoE) in error-prone transmission conditions. We describe our error detection and concealment implementation on the JSVM 9.15 reference decoder and assess its effectiveness through several quality indicators. Results show an improvement of the proposed concealment strategy when compared to the standard Frame Copy (FC) and Interpolation, in terms of Peak Signal-to-Signal Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity Index Metric (SSIM) quality metrics. This improvement is evident in the case of concealment on quality enhancement layers, since video fluidity is preserved assuring an acceptable QoE to the end users.