A new paradigm for multiple description video coding

Multiple description coding (MDC) is a source coding technique that exploits path diversity to combat packet losses over error-prone channels. In this thesis, we proposed a novel drift-free multi-state MDC method. At the encoder side, the original video is compressed into multiple independently decodable H.263 streams, each with its own coding structure and prediction process, such that if one stream is lost, the other stream can still be used to produce video with acceptable quality. At the decoder side, each description is considered as a noisy observation of the original video. A minimum mean-square error (MMSE) based joint reconstruction algorithm is proposed to combine the descriptions. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has high coding efficiency, yet with strong error resilience.