Error-propagation reduction in a balanced multiple description video coder

Compressed video streams are very exposed to channel losses when they are transmitted through an unreliable network. The predictive encoding scheme is efficient but even a single packet loss can cause decoding error propagation through all the frames following the erasure. An error-resilience approach to tackle this problem is the multiple description coding (MDC) technique. Another important issue connected to this approach is the problem of the error-concealment (EC) used to reconstruct the information lost during the transmission. In this paper, we deal with a sequence-based EC algorithm that performs the error-concealment by using the information coming from a certain number of frames in the future to minimize the effect of error propagation. The target of this work is applying such an EC strategy to a balanced MDC system. Simulation results show the great improvement that a sequence-based EC algorithm can give compared to classical EC approaches.