End-to-End Rate-Distortion Optimized Description Generation for H.264 Multiple Description Video Coding

In this paper, H.264/AVC primary and redundant slices interlaced multiple description video coding (PRSI-MDVC) is studied due to its high coding efficiency and ease of constructing multiple descriptions by interleaving primary and redundant slices, where the problem of optimal description generation in the rate-distortion sense is addressed. Optimal description generation requires minimization of end-to-end distortion consisting of both source coding distortion determined by quality of primary slices and channel distortion associated with redundant slice coding, subject to a rate constraint. The relevant existing works on the description generation mainly focus on the estimation of channel distortion to determine the amount of inserted redundancy (quality of redundant slices) but ignore the source distortion estimation for the quality of primary slices, thus a comprehensive end-to-end rate-distortion optimization is still unavailable. In this paper, we attack the minimization of the end-to-end distortion by fully exploring temporal coding dependency. Specifically, on one hand, a most recently developed source distortion temporal propagation model is employed to determine coding options of primary slices in the PRSI-MDVC. On the other hand, channel distortion estimation is mainly concerned with the mismatch error estimation when primary slices are lost. Unlike the existing channel distortion estimation approach under the asymptotic fine quantization assumption which is not valid in most practical cases (e.g., at low or medium coding rates), we develop a novel and more feasible estimation scheme, based on which coding parameters of the redundant slices can be better determined. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed frame-level rate-distortion optimized description generation scheme compared with the relevant approaches.