Abstract
In this paper, an informed watermarking algorithm is proposed that aids in concealing packet loss errors in video communications. This watermark-based error concealment (WEC) method embeds a low resolution version of the video frame inside itself as watermark data. At the receiver, the extracted watermark is used as a reference for error concealment. The proposed DCT-based algorithm employs informed watermarking techniques in order to minimize the distortion of host frames. At the encoder, a predictive feedback loop is employed which helps to adjust the strength of the data embedding. Furthermore, the distortion of the DCT coefficients introduced in the embedding can be removed to a considerable extent, by employing bit-sign adaptivity. Simulation results on standard video sequences show that the proposed informed WEC scheme has an advantage of 3$\sim$4 dB in PSNR over non-informed WEC and that even a non-informed WEC is still superior to conventional error concealment techniques.