Composing better pictures in MDC: A multi-target total variational approach

In any multiple description coding (MDC) system, how to compose pictures of the “best” quality upon receiving more than one description is always important. To this goal, a DCT-domain translation and overlapping technique has been developed in for the popular multiple description scalar quantization (MDSQ) based video coding. Although certain quality gain (in terms of PSNR) has been achieved, the improvement is rather limited. In this paper, we formulate this problem into a traditional total variation (TV) regularized optimization in which all received descriptions are regarded as multiple fidelity terms. We demonstrate that, as compared to the overlapping technique, such a TV-based enhancement yields not only a higher objective quality gain but also a much more significant visual quality gain in the composed pictures.