Enhanced Multiple Description Decoder for Error-Prone Channels

Multiple description coding (MDC) is applied to achieve acceptable performance when only one single description is received correctly, and better resolution of the source when all descriptions are received correctly. In previous work, the description with bit errors is either discarded completely, or estimated by using complicated algorithms. A new central receiver is proposed in this paper so as to achieve better performance by utilizing the residual information between descriptions received correctly or with noise. After theoretical analysis based on MDSQ, optimal and suboptimal solutions are provided. Analytical and experimental results show that the proposed algorithms achieve better performance than the side distortion within a large range of BERs. In particular, the suboptimal algorithm achieves similar performance to that of the optimal with low computational complexity and without accurate channel knowledge.