Multiple description image transmission for diversity systems over unreliable communication networks

In this article, the development of an efficient and reliable multiple description coding (MDC) scheme over unreliable communication networks is described. A general framework of multiple description robust communication system with 2- and 4-channel cases is presented with a proposed block-based DC separation approach. The advantage of this system is that, if all the channels work, a high quality reconstruction can be achieved, while a lower but still acceptable quality can be achieved if some of the channels are lost. The peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), mean squared error (MSE), bit rate, entropy and redundancy are also calculated with the proposed method to analyze the reconstruction quality. It is found that the proposed method gives comprehensive improvements over the other recently developed methods.