The improved central decoder of a multiple description and distributed codec for videos

Multiple description coding (MDC) provides stable wireless multimedia communications with the help of multiple transmission paths, while distributed video coding (DVC) effectively shifts the encoder complexity to decoder for mobile media devices. We proposed to combine MDC with DVC, abbreviated as MDVC, to construct a reliable and efficient video codec system. To improve the codec performance, the DPCM prediction gain is exploited from the correlations among sub-video sequences inside the MDVC to increase the reconstructed video quality. In addition, a MDVC central decoder control method, operated dynamically at frame-level, is proposed to improve the adaptation capability, as compared to the current MDC central decoder that selects one best description for the output video. The intra-and inter-correlations among MDC descriptions were investigated to make this frame selection decision for the central decoder. Simulations showed that the proposed MDVC control method demonstrates higher average PSNR and lower PSNR variations of the output videos, with the help of DPCM prediction gain and the efficient central decoder control method that correctly selected high quality WZ frames for low quality key-frames.