M-Channel Multiple Description Coding with Two-Rate Predictive Coding and Staggered Quantization

A low complexity multiple description (MD) coding method is proposed to generate M descriptions. Consider the MD coding of a stationary correlated source. We first fictitiously partition the source into sample blocks of size M, i.e., M polyphases. Each description encodes all input samples, but with a variable bit rate that depends on the indices of the sample and the description. A special DPCM encoder is used in each description, where each sample is predicted from the reconstructed samples in the same description. The prediction error is uniformly scalar-quantized and entropy coded.