Soft Input Error Resilient Multiple Description Coding for Rayleigh Fading Channels

Error resilient multiple description coding (ERMDC) consists of a robust encoder and an enhanced decoder. It was developed to achieve higher error tolerance than the classical multiple description coding (MDC) for error-prone channels when bit errors of one description exceeded the error correction capability of the applied forward error correction (FEC) code. In this paper, ERMDC is extended to Rayleigh fading channels with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) by utilizing soft channel outputs. By using soft channel outputs as receiver inputs, the accuracy of estimates of detectable transmission errors is improved so that the reconstruction distortion is reduced further. Experimental results show that soft input ERMDC outperforms significantly the existing works without extra redundancy.