Multiple descriptions scalable video coding

Multiple description coding (MDC) is a joint source-channel coding technique specifically designed for real-time multimedia applications over best effort switched packet networks (such as Internet), in order to cope with packet losses due to transmission errors or network congestion. Error resilience of transmitted bitstreams is thus significantly increased, but this does not solve problems like bitstream adaptation to bandwidth variations or receiver characteristics, which are in turn addressed by scalable coding techniques. In this paper, we present a new method of multiple description coding of scalable video, combining the scalability features with MDC. It is based on a motion-compensated spatio-temporal subband decomposition, where the redundancy is tunable in a frame-like non-linear temporal representation.