Spatial Error Concealment Technique for Losslessly Compressed Images Using Data Hiding in Error-Prone Channels

Abstract

Error concealment techniques are significant due to the growing interest in imagery transmission over error-prone channels. This paper presents a spatial error concealment technique for losslessly compressed images using least significant bit (LSB)-based data hiding to reconstruct a close approximation after the loss of image blocks during image transmission. Before transmission, block description information (BDI) is generated by applying quantization following discrete wavelet transform. This is then embedded into the LSB plane of the original image itself at the encoder. At the decoder, this BDI is used to conceal blocks that may have been dropped during the transmission. Although the original image is modified slightly by the message embedding process, no perceptible artifacts are introduced and the visual quality is sufficient for analysis and diagnosis. In comparisons with previous methods at various loss rates, the proposed technique is shown to be promising due to its good performance in the case of a loss of isolated and continuous blocks.