Robust Video Coding Based on Multiple Description Scalar Quantization With Side Information

This paper addresses the problem of video compression for robust transmission on lossy Internet networks. The approach developed relies on multiple description coding (MDC) principles. Predictive multiple description video coding has already been considered for robust video transmission over lossy channels. However, MDC, when combined with motion-compensated prediction, is known to suffer from predictive mismatch: in presence of losses, the prediction signal available at the decoder may differ from the one used at the encoder. In this paper, we describe a video compression scheme based on MDC and Wyner-Ziv (WZ) coding. The input sequence is structured into groups of pictures which contain one key frame and one WZ frame. Each frame is first transformed with a wavelet transform and the resulting frequency bands are quantized with a multiple description scalar quantizer. Two balanced descriptions of the video input are thus generated. The quantization indexes of the WZ frames are coded with an low-density parity-check accumulate-based Slepian-Wolf (SW) coder. The lateral receivers first decode the received key frame lateral descriptions, and then construct the side information needed for decoding the corresponding WZ frame descriptions by motion-compensated interpolation. In the case where the two WZ data descriptions are received, the central decoder can perform a separate SW decoding of the two sequences of quantization indexes. A joint iterative decoding approach of the two WZ descriptions is also described which improve the central WZ data decoding performance, however, at the expense of increased decoding complexity. The influence of the proposed iterative decoding technique and of the amount of redundancy on the lateral and central rate-distortion performance of the algorithm is studied.