A novel multiple description video coding based on H.264/AVC video coding standard

Multiple description coding (MDC) is a source coding technique that exploits path diversity to solve packet losses over error-prone channels. In this paper, we propose an improved drift-free multi-state MDC method based on H.264/AVC coding scheme. At the encoder side, we compress original video into multiple independent H.264 streams with different coding parameters, which can help us to control correlations between the descriptions. At the decoder side, each description is considered as a noisy observation of the original video, and a linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) based merge algorithm is proposed to combine the descriptions. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve better coding efficiency and visual quality than temporary MDC present in [1]. The error resilience ability is also improved by the fact that each frame is coded twice with different parameters.