Coordinated application of multiple description scalar quantization and error concealment for error-resilient MPEG video streaming

Historically, multiple description coding (MDC) and postprocessing error concealment (ECN) algorithms have evolved separately. In this paper, we propose a coordinated application of multiple description scalar quantizers (MDSQ) and ECN, where the smoothness of the video signal helps to compensate for the loss of descriptions. In particular, we perform a reconstruction that is consistent with the data received at the decoder. When only a single description is available, the video is reconstructed in such a way that: 1) if we were to regenerate two descriptions (from the reconstructed video), one of them would be equivalent to the received description and 2) the reconstructed video is spatiotemporally smooth. Experimental results with several video sequences demonstrated a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) improvement of 0.9-2.8 dB for intracoded frames. The PSNR improvements for intercoded frames were negligible. However, for both cases, the visual improvements were much more striking than what the PSNR improvement suggested.