Efficient prediction in multiple description video coding

This work is concerned with the design of multiple description (MD) compression systems with emphasis on video coding. Although inter-frame prediction is critical to the performance of video coders, the problem of efficient prediction in MD systems has not been satisfactorily resolved. We focus on quantizer based MD coding and propose an estimation theoretic (ET) approach to prediction and reconstruction. The advantage of ET prediction is two fold: (1) It takes into account all the information available at each decoder for an optimal estimate; (2) It mitigates the degradation due to quantization in the prediction feedback loop. The ET approach is first shown to achieve significant gains in the simpler setting of predictive MD coding of synthetic Gauss-Markov and Laplace-Markov processes. We then present performance results for MD compression of video sequences and demonstrate consistent and substantial PSNR gains over conventional techniques