Tree-Structured Multiple Description Coding for Multiview Mobile TV and Camera-Phone Networks

Since multiview video communications facilitate the selection of several camera views of a given scene, it may be deemed to be a promising technique for mobile television and camera-phone networks. Similar to conventional single-view video, multiview video also suffers from packet loss events imposed by network congestion. Multiple description coding (MDC) constitutes an attractive candidate solution for mitigating the packet loss events in conventional video communications. Hence it may also be deemed to be an attractive solution for multiview video. In this paper, we propose a novel tree-structured MDC (T-MDC) scheme, which can be readily implemented with the aid of arbitrary video codecs, including multiview codecs. Moreover, the proposed philosophy enables the flexible creation of a variable number of unequal importance descriptions. Finally, we will conceive a joint multiple description coding and multiview video coding (MVC) scheme. We compare two specific tree- structured MDC schemes, namely a so-called height- one complete tree-structured MDC (HOCT-MDC) and a binary tree-structured MDC (BT-MDC) scheme, which we benchmarked against simulcasting aided single description coding in the context of both single and multiview video.