New approach to multiple description pyramid lattice vector quantization for robust image coding

Multiple description coding (MDC) is a new approach to alleviate the problem of packet loss in image communication over erasure channels, such as Internet and wireless networks. With decomposing an image into several descriptions and transmitting them over different channels, MDC improves the reconstructed image quality with respect to losing portions of the packet. In this paper, a new image coding scheme, called as multiple description pyramid lattice vector quantization (MDPLVQ), is proposed for robust image coding, utilizing wavelet tree structure of image and two alterable quantizers to control the redundancy of MDPLVQ. Experimental results show that the presented MDPLVQ is quite efficient.