Rate/distortion optimization in multiple description video coding

Abstract

Multiple Description Coding (MDC) is a technique where multiple streams from a video source are generated, each individually decodable and mutually refinable. MDC is a promising solution to overcome packet loss in video transmission over noisy channels, particularly for real-time applications in which retransmission of lost information is not practical. The error resiliency feature of MDC is achieved at the cost of redundancy, and the required amount of redundancy for each frame depends on the packet loss ratio and also the importance of the frame in the sequence. Due to the error propagation in video transmission over lossy channels, reference frames of a Group of Pictures (GOP) are more important for video reconstruction and, hence, need more redundancy to increase the chance of being received correctly. Therefore a channel adaptive optimization for frame-wise redundancy allocation is needed. In this paper, based on the difference of the side and central decoder outputs, the receiver side distortion is formulated and then used for optimization of a MDC scheme. The performance of the optimizer is verified by experimental results measured from JM 16.0, H.264/AVC reference software.