Multiple description video coding based on forward error correction within expanding windows

In this paper, an MDC scheme based on forward error correction(FEC) within expanding windows is proposed. Firstly, the video sequence will be coded into source packets with/without slice group enabled. Secondly, the appropriate FEC packets are inserted according to the packet loss rate. Since the previous frames in a GOP is generally more important than the following frames in the GOP, an expanding window is exploited so that the FEC packets for the current frame will also protect the previous frames in the window. After this, the source packets with the inserted FEC packets will be divided into two descriptions and transmitted into two independent channels. When some packets in one description are lost, FEC decoding will try to recover the lost packets. Through this scheme, the source packets can get appropriate protection while the compression efficiency will not be degraded too much. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the compared schemes up to 3 dB.