A drift-free motion-compensated predictive encoding technique for multiple description coding

Abstract

Multiple description coding (MDC) is a source coding technique that exploits path diversity to increase the robustness of transmitting a compressed signal over error-prone channels. However, the applicant of MDC to video coding is still problematic because a prediction mismatch problem, called drift, may occur at the decoder when one description is lost. In this paper, we propose a drift free motion-compensated predictive coding method for multiple description scalar quantizers. The proposed method maintains two more prediction loops at the encoder side to produce all possible predictions. Then, the two descriptions are generated from these two additional prediction loops in such a way that the drift can be prevented when only one description is received. By receiving both descriptions, the decoder can still combine these two descriptions in the central prediction loop to improve the video quality. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively prevent drift and improve the quality of single-description reconstruction by 0.2-0.8 dB as compared to the method in [A. Reibman et al., 1999].