Robust video monitoring system for transport applications based on joint use of multiple description coding and multiple antennas

In this paper, we investigate the joint use of multiple description coding (MDC) and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology in the specific context of wireless embedded real time video surveillance for transportation applications. The combination of both techniques is expected to provide reliability of transmitted data and graceful degradation of reconstructed video signal. The transmission chain proposed in this work is based on the WiMAX IEEE 802.16d standard. It consists in a 2times4 MIMO system associated with an OFDM physical layer. Different MDC algorithms have been developed with respect to the actual H.264/AVC compression standard. Preliminary results are presented and discussed in order to illustrate the interest of the proposed solution in terms of error robustness and decoded video quality.