Using self-authentication-and-recovery images for error concealment in wireless environments

Abstract

Handling packet loss or delay in the mobile and/or Internet environment is usually a challenging problem for multimedia transmission. Using connection-oriented protocol such as TCP may introduce intolerable time delay in re-transmission. Using datagram-oriented protocols such as UDP may cause partial representation in case of packet loss. In this paper, we propose a new method of using our self-authentication-and-recovery images (SARI) to do the error detection and concealment in the UDP environment. The lost information in a SARI image can be approximately recovered based on the embedded watermark, which includes the content-based authentication information and recovery information. Images or video frames are watermarked in a priori such that no additional mechanism is needed in the networking or the encoding process. Because the recovery is not based on adjacent blocks, the proposed method can recover the corrupted area even though the information loss happen in large areas or high variant areas. Our experiments show the advantages of such technique in both transmission time saving and broad application potentials.