Multiple description video coding with adaptive number of descriptions

Multiple description video coding methods can mitigate the effects of packet losses introduced by congestion and/or bit errors. However, the proposed multiple description video coders are not adaptive to network conditions. In this paper, we propose a novel multiple description video coding technique, based on the state-ofthe art scalable video coding scheme, which provides flexibility in the number of descriptions, redundancy in descriptions and the bitrate of each description by manipulating the encoded bitstream, post encoding. Also, the proposed method provides excellent coding efficiency, outperforming most other multiple description methods proposed so far. We compare the performance of the proposed method to other multiple description video coders. We also show the use of changing the number of descriptions according to network conditions, by an NS-2 network simulation of a peer-to-peer video streaming system.