Multiple Description Coding for Multipath Video Streaming

Abstract

This Chapter addresses robust video coding and adaptation of compressed streams in multipath communications environments, using Multiple Description Coding (MDC). A review of Multiple Description (MD) video coding is presented, covering different video coding approaches. Different path diversity topologies and MDC networking applications are described, including MD video adaptation schemes to operate at network edges, for robust video streaming. A multi-loop architecture for Advanced Video Coding (AVC) to prevent drift distortion accumulation is also described. A simulation study of MDC for AVC is presented to evaluate the coding efficiency, the effects of distortion propagation and streaming performance in lossy networks. These research findings extend the current state-of-the-art MDC methods by developing new networking capabilities in different application scenarios maintaining coding efficiency, and increasing error robustness, when subject to transmission losses.