An improved Multiple Description Scalable Coding for Video Transmission over Unreliable Networks

Developing real time multimedia applications for best e ff ort networks such as the Internet requires prohibitions against jitter delay and frame loss. This problem is further complicated in wireless networks as the rate of frame corruption or loss is higher in wireless networks while they generally have lower data rates compared to wired networks. On the other hand, variations of the bandwidth and the receiving device characteristics require data rate adaptation capability of the coding method. Multiple description Scalable  Coding (MDS) methods are used to solve the jitter delay and frame loss problems by making the transmitted data more error resilient, however, this results in reduced data rate because of the added overhead. MDS methods do not address the bandwidth variation and receiver characteristics di ff erences. In this paper a new method based on integrating MDS and the scalable  coding   extension of H.264 standard is proposed. Our method can handle both jitter delay and frame loss, and data rate adaptation problems. Our method utilizes motion compensating scheme and, therefore, is compatible with the current video coding standards such as MPEG-4 and H.264. Based on the simulated network conditions, our method shows promising results and we have achieved up to 38.3607dB for average Y-PSNR.