Combinatorial message sharing and random binning for multiple description coding

This paper proposes a new multiple description (MD) coding method and an associated achievable rate-distortion region for L ≥ 2 channels. The proposed scheme randomly bins codebooks chosen from the codebook structure, similar to that of the recently proposed combinatorial message sharing (CMS) scheme designed for conditional codebook encoding. The proposed scheme effectively performs multilayer random binning for each subset of the description, which hence enables to utilize the symmetry of a “subset” of the description rates wherever it exists. The new scheme specializes in to the conventional multilayer random binning as an extreme special case.