Error-resilient video coding using multiple description motion compensation

Abstract

A new approach for multiple description video coding is proposed. It employs a second-order predictor for motion-compensation, which predicts a current frame from two previously coded frames. The coder generates two descriptions, containing the coded even and odd frames, respectively. When only a single description (say, that containing even frames) is received, the decoder can only use previous even frames for prediction. The mismatch between the predicted frames at the encoder and decoder is explicitly coded to avoid error propagation in the ideal MD channels, where a description is either received intact or lost completely. By using the second-order predictor and coding the mismatch signal, one can also suppress error propagation in packet lossy networks where packets in either description can be lost. The predictor and the mismatch signal quantizer can be varied to achieve a wide range of tradeoffs between coding efficiency and error resilience.