Multiple Description of Coded Video for Path Diversity Streaming Adaptation

This paper extends the current concept of multiple description coding (MDC) to the compressed domain, by proposing efficient splitting of standard single description coded (SDC) video into a multi-stream representation. A novel multiple description video splitting (MDVS) scheme is proposed to operate at network edges, for increased robustness in path diversity video streaming across heterogeneous communications chains. It is shown that poor performance of existing methods is mainly due to distortion accumulation, i.e., drift, when decoding is carried out with missing descriptions. The proposed scheme is able to effectively control drift distortion in both intra and inter predictive coding, even when only one description reaches the decoder. This is achieved by generating a controlled amount of relevant side information to compensate for drift accumulation, whenever any description is lost in its path. The simulation results show that any individual description can be decoded on its own without producing drift, achieving significant quality improvement at reduced redundancy cost. The overall performance evaluation, carried out by simulating video streaming over lossy networks with path diversity, also demonstrates that MDVS enables higher quality video in such heterogeneous networking environments, for a wide range of packet loss rates.