Intra-Frame Error Concealment Scheme Using 3D Reversible Data Hiding in Mobile Cloud Environment

In mobile cloud environment, data are mainly transmitted via wireless noisy channels, which may result in random transmission errors (RTE) with a high probability. For video transmission, noisy channels may cause significant degradation of the content. Improving or keeping video quality over lossy channel is, therefore, a very important research topic. Error concealment with data hiding (ECDH) is an effective way to conceal the errors introduced by channels, and it can reduce error propagation between neighbor blocks/frames. The existing video ECDH methods often embed the motion vectors (MVs) into the specific locations. Nevertheless, specific embedding locations cannot resist against RTE. To compensate the RTE in mobile cloud environment, we propose a video ECDH scheme using 3D reversible data hiding (RDH), in which we create multiple duplicate copies of each MV to improve the robustness of the ECDH scheme. Furthermore, all the duplicate copies and original MVs are embedded into macroblocks randomly. However, embedding more data would make quality of marked video decreased. In addition, satisfactory trade-off between the introduced distortion and the reconstructed video quality can be achieved by tuning the number of duplicate copies. For random embedding, the lost probability of the MVs decreases rapidly which can result in better error concealment performance. Experimental results show that the peak signal to noise ratio values gain about 5 dB at least comparing with the existing ECDH methods. Meanwhile, the proposed method improves the video quality significantly.