Poliphase subsampling multiple description coding using robust edge-preserving interpolation

Multiple Description Coding (MDC) is aimed at achieving transmission diversity for error resilient purposes by transmitting different coded descriptions of the same data. In this paper we analyze a poliphase subsampling MDC technique implemented by pre-processing and post-processing stages of a H.264/AVC standard compliant encoder and decoder. The pre-processing step performs a suitable interleaving that builds a synthetic sequence where each frame carries different subsampled frames of the original sequence. The synthetic sequence is ordinarily encoded and transmitted. At the receiver side, the H.264 decoder performs error concealment exploiting the multiple data descriptions, and the de-interleaving stage generates a decoded version of the original sequence. A robust restoration algorithm based on edge-preserving interpolation is then applied. Simulations show that the analyzed scheme improves the decoded video sequence quality both from an objective and from a subjective point of view.