Successive refinement of overlapped cell side quantizers for scalable multiple description coding

Scalable multiple description coding (SMDC) provides reliability and facility to truncate the descriptions according to the user rate-distortion requirements. In this paper we generalize the conditions of successive refinement of the side quantizer of a multiple description scalar quantizer that has overlapped quantizer cells generated by a modified linear index assignment matrix. We propose that the split or refinement factor for each of the refinement side quantizers should be greater than the maximum side quantizer bin spread and should not be integer multiples of each other for satisfying the SMDC distortion conditions and verify through simulation results on scalable multiple description image coding.