System and method for video error concealment

Abstract

The present invention provides, in one embodiment, a system and method for concealing video errors. The system encodes, reorders, and packetizes video information into video data packets for transmission over a communication network such that the system conceals errors caused by lost video data packets when the system receives, depacketizes, orders, and decodes the data packets. In one embodiment, the system and method encodes and packetizes video information, such that adjacent macroblocks are not placed in the same video data packets. Additionally, the system and method may provide information accompanying the video data packets to facilitate the decoding process. An advantage to such a scheme is that errors due to video data packet loss are spatially distributed over a video frame. Thus, if regions of data surrounding a lost macroblock are successfully decoded, the decoder may predict motion vectors and spatial content with a higher degree of accuracy, which leads to higher video quality.

1 . A system for processing video data, comprising: 
 a coding engine for processing each frame of a video signal to generate macroblocks and to encode the macroblocks;    a macroblock reordering engine for assigning a macroblock group identifier (MBGID) from a plurality of MBGIDs to each encoded macroblock; and    a macroblock packetization engine for placing each of the encoded macroblocks into a particular data packet according to the MBGID.