An Efficient Multiple Description Coding Scheme for the Scalable Extension of H.264/AVC (SVC)

The demand for efficient scalable video codecs has constantly been on the rise in response to the increase in the variety of services and QoS requirements in multimedia networks. Existing standardization efforts, such as the scalable video coding extension of the H.264/AVC standard, do not offer efficient error resilient protection for all the different levels of video enhancement. We developed a multiple description scalable video coding technique that offers complementary and independently decodable descriptions, offering acceptable video quality even if only one of them is successfully received. Performance evaluations show that our scheme delivers an average improvement of 5 dB for single channel decoding and an improvement of 2 dB on average for packet loss simulations when compared with the UXP protected SD-SVC and the multiple-description motion compensated temporal filtering (MD-MCTF) scheme at comparable redundancy levels