Low-delay distributed multiple description coding for error-resilient video transmission

Abstract

In this paper, a low-delay distributed multiple description coding (LD-DMDC) method that combines the principles of multiple description coding (MDC) and distributed video coding (DVC) has been proposed to further improve the error resilience of DVC. The proposed method generates two descriptions based on duplication and alternation of the discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients for the Wyner-Ziv (WZ) frames and by exploiting H.264/AVC's dispersed flexible macroblock ordering (FMO) for the key frames. The proposed method makes efficient use of skip blocks to exploit temporal redundancies between successive frames and employs a binary arithmetic coding instead of iterative channel coding to reduce the system latency. Simulation results show that the proposed method is robust against transmission errors, while maintaining low encoder complexity and low system latency.