Drift-free multiple description intra video coding

This paper proposes a multiple description coding scheme based on a multi-loop structure, which prevents drift distortion accumulation in intra predicted slices. The drift is compensated by generating a controlled amount of side information used by the decoder whenever any description is lost in the corresponding network path. The experimental results show that intra predicted slices do not suffer from drift and their quality is significantly improved (e.g., 6-8 dB) at reduced redundancy cost, (e.g., 0.2-0.25), in comparison with the open loop implementation. Error propagation in subsequent frames is also evaluated when one description is lost for a whole frame and for two rows of macroblocks. In both cases the overall video quality is significantly improved and considering normal GOP sizes the redundancy introduced by the proposed scheme is negligible.