Multiple Description Conjugate Vector Quantizers with Side Distortion Compensation

Conjugate vector quantizer (CVQ), a joint source channel coding scheme robust to channel bit errors, is used in various popular speech coders such as ITU-T G.729 and ISO/IEC MPEG4 audio. We propose two multiple description CVQ (MD-CVQ) schemes for combating channel erasure errors. MD-CVQ offers an advantage of moderate computational complexity and storage over conventional MD vector quantizers (MDVQs). Experiments are performed for both i.i.d. Gaussian source and speech/audio signals. Results show that for low channel loss rates, a tradeoff exists between choosing MD-CVQ for its low complexity and MDVQ for its higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) performance. For medium to high channel loss rates, MD-CVQ is preferred for its low complexity and comparable SNR performance to MDVQ