Matching pursuits multiple description coding for wireless video

Abstract

Multiple description coding (MDC) is an error resilient source coding scheme that creates multiple bitstreams of approximately equal importance. We develop a 2 description video coding scheme based on the 3 loop structure originally studied in Reibman et al. (1999). We modify the discrete cosine transform structure to the matching pursuits framework and evaluate performance gain using maximum likelihood (ML) enhancement when both descriptions are available. We find that ML enhancement works best for low motion sequences. Performance comparison is made between our MDC scheme and single description coding (SDC) schemes over two-state Markov channels and Rayleigh fading channels. We find that MDC outperforms SDC in bursty slowly varying environments. In the case of Rayleigh fading channels, interleaving helps SDC close the gap and even outperform MDC depending on the amount of interleaving performed, at the expense of additional delay.