Multiple description speech coding with diversities

Multiple description coding (MDC) allows management of tradeoff in achievable rate-distortion performance among various components in a processing (coding-decoding) system or channels in a transmission scheme. Current MDC methods first fix performance of the central decoder at a conventional single description (SD) level. and then inject inter-channel redundancy to side coders to provide the needed robustness in case of information loss during transmission. In this work. we relegate the SD structure and quality to side decoders, and concentrate on improving the central decoder beyond the known SD quality. We provide justification for this alternative, state its inherent nature and challenge, and propose an efficient method to design MD coder under such criterion.