Entropy analysis on multiple description video coding based on pre- and post-processing

Multiple description (MD) video coding is a promising method to solve real-time video transmission over unreliable network. In the conventional MD video coding, the original video sequence can be split directly into two subsequences by odd and even means. Then the two sub-sequences can be compressed as two descriptions by the standard video encoder. The conventional MD scheme is simple to realize but it may lead to worse reconstructed quality when one description is lost. To solve this problem, the MD scheme based on pre- and post-processing is proposed in this paper. Before odd and even splitting, the original video sequence can be pre-processed by effective redundancy allocation, which is helpful for the estimation of the lost description. Furthermore, the entropy of the descriptions is used to analyse the rate-distortion performance of the two MD schemes. Lastly, the experimental results have shown the proposed MD scheme has better reconstructed quality when information lost has happened, while the conventional MD scheme has better compression efficiency when information can be transmitted accurately. It can be found that the experimental results can be consistent with the entropy analysis.