Multiple description source coding with side information

Multiple description coding with side information at the receiver is particularly relevant for robust transmission in sensor networks where correlated data is being transmitted to a common receiver, as well as for robust video compression. The rate-distortion region for this problem has been established in the work of Diggavi and Vaishampayan (2004). Here, we focus on the design of a practical multiple description coding scheme with side information at the receiver. It builds upon both multiple description coding principles and Slepian-Wolf (SW) coding principles. The input source is first quantized with a multiple description scalar quantizer (MDSQ) which introduces redundancy or correlation in the transmitted streams in order to take advantage of network path diversity. The resulting sequences of indexes are SW encoded, that is separately encoded and jointly decoded. While the first step (MDSQ) plays the role of a channel code, the second one (SW coding) plays the role of a source code, compressing the sequences of quantized indexes. In a second step, cross-decoding of the two descriptions which allows accounting for both the correlation with the side information as well as the correlation between the two descriptions is considered.