A novel error concealment procedure is presented for recovering the lost macroblock while decoding an erroneous MPEG-2 bitstream. The proposed weighted boundary matching algorithm (WBMA) refines the conventional boundary matching algorithm. Different from the conventional BMAs, the boundary pixels of a lost macroblock are compared with those of the previous picture located in the same position. The weighting coefficients are also adaptively adjusted to work robustly in either smooth or abruptly-changing regions. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the conventional algorithms, especially for the interlaced sequences having large motion or complicated textures. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.