Two-Description Image Coding With Steganography

For two-description image coding, a conventional scheme is to partition an image into two parts and then to produce each description by alternatively concatenating a finely coded bitstream of one part and a coarsely coded bitstream of the other part. This letter presents a new two-description image coding approach using steganography. Specifically, we propose forming each description by embedding (hiding) the coarsely coded part into the finely coded part based on a least-significant bit (LSB) steganographic method. In this way, the bit budget for the coarsely coded part in each description can be saved with little reconstruction degradation for the finely coded part if the embedding process is well designed. The experimental results substantiate the effectiveness of the proposed method.