A novel multiple description video coding based on data reuse

A novel H.264-based multiple description coding (MDC) framework, called data reuse MDC (DR-MDC), is proposed in this paper. The input video sequence is first down-sampled by a factor of two in both horizontal and vertical directions, respectively, on each frame to generate four sub-sequences, followed by grouping them into two descriptions via the quincunx manner. In each description, one sub-sequence is directly encoded by applying the H.264/AVC encoder, while the other is examined at each macroblock (MB) to determine whether the encoding of the current MB should be conducted or skipped completely based on the following criterion: If the MB is considered locating in a homogeneous or still background region, the encoding process will be skipped. Otherwise, the neighboring prediction algorithm will be used to predict the pixel values of this MB, and the resultant prediction errors will be further encoded and transmitted. Experimental results have shown that the proposed DR-MDC scheme is more error resilient and yields better reconstructed video than the existing state-of-the-art MDC methods.