Drift-free multiple description video coding with redundancy rate-distortion optimization

Multiple description coding (MDC) has been shown to be robust for video transmission over error-prone channels. By applying the extra prediction loops to the multiple description transform video coder, the mismatching error (drift) incurred by the one-channel pairwise correlating transform reconstruction is decreased. However, the problem of effective redundancy allocation is introduced by the drift coding. In this paper, we propose an approach to optimize the drift-free multiple description video coding scheme. The optimization is in the redundancy rate-distortion sense using the Lagrangian relaxation method for optimum allocation of redundancy amongst the correlating transform and the drift coding. The experimental results show that our algorithm achieves substantial gains over the conventional MDC coder.