Multiple description coding for Internet video streaming

We present a system for video streaming well adapted to the unpredictable and varying nature of Internet. The proposed system uses a superposition of several multiple description coding (MDC) schemes, each with N = 2 descriptions, to reach rate scalability and adaptability to varying channel conditions. Each MDC (N = 2 descriptions), that we will call base MDC has a bit rate and a redundancy associated. The superposition of several base MDC results on a MDC scheme for N > 2 descriptions with different bit rates, allowing rate scalability, for different redundancies. The proposed scheme is well adapted to varying channel conditions. In the proposed method multiple descriptions are generated by the coder and downloaded in the server, leaving to the server the only task to choose sending out the right description at the right time depending of channel conditions (bandwidth and loss rate).