An Error Resilient Multiple Description Video Coder

Abstract

The idea of multiple description video coding has been introduced to deal with the issues of bandwidth/path diversity and packet loss due to network congestion and/or error-prone channels which might cause serious quality degradation in video applications such as multimedia streaming and video conferencing services. In this paper, two approaches to description generation are proposed to produce multiple descriptions at higher coding efficiency. One of them is motivated by the multiple description scalar quantizer to reduce the distortion and the other is the coefficient partition in transform domain in order to balance the descriptions better. An estimation mechanism is further proposed to alleviate the drifting problem due to description fluctuation by synchronizing the reference frames at the encoder and the decoder as much as possible. The experiments show that the proposed methods offer substantial improvement at the event of description loss.