Multiple description coding with randomly offset quantizers

A multiple description coding scheme based on prediction-induced randomly offset quantizers is proposed, where each description encodes one source subset with a small quantization stepsize, and other subsets are predictively coded with a large quantization stepsize. Due to the prediction, the quantization bins that a coefficient belongs to in different descriptions are randomly overlapped with each others. The optimal reconstruction is obtained by finding the intersection of all received quantization bins. Using the recently developed random quantization theory, the closed-form expression of the expected distortion is obtained. The proposed scheme is then applied to lapped transform-based multiple-description image coding, and an iterative optimization scheme is developed to find the optimal lapped transform. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves better performance than other methods in this category.