Design of a fixed-rate multiple description image coder

Abstract

Multiple description coding refers to encoding an information source into multiple bitstreams in a way to be able to trade oft between channel protection and decoding quality. In this paper we propose a two-description subband image coder. We use over-sampling to produce redundancy for the lowest frequency subband which has the highest visual quality, and then split the subbands samples among the two descriptions. In the quantization stage, we use optimized scalar quantizer for the two descriptions of the lowest frequency subband, and pyramid vector quantization for high frequency subbands. We provide the PSNR of reconstructed image in different situations.