H.264/AVC-Based Multiple Description Coding Scheme

A new multiple description coding (MDC) scheme is proposed in this paper. It utilizes the advanced video coding tools and features provided in H.264/AVC to introduce redundancy into descriptions. The proposed MDC scheme produces two descriptions, each consisting of two slice groups. One of them, called main slice group (MSG), is encoded in the normal way as main information. The other one, called side slice group (SSG), is encoded with fewer bits as redundancy by using larger quantization step sizes. Spatial and temporal correlations between neighboring macroblocks in video frames are exploited to achieve efficient redundancy coding. Experimental results show that the proposed MDC scheme achieves better rate-distortion (R-D) performance than previous slice-group based MDC schemes.