On Natural Type Selection in Universal Multiple Description Coding

In this paper, we generalize the concept of natural type selection, initially proposed by R.Zamir et.al., to multiple description coding. We prove results that are parallel to those of adaptive single description coding. A universal multiple description coding scheme is then proposed. The scheme codes a source vector at a time, and updates its codebooks based on the joint type of the codewords reconstructed previously. Based on our theoretical results, it can be shown that the rate-distortion performance of the proposed scheme gradually improves as coding proceeds.