| Vol. 2, No. 1, November 2005 - Art. 7 |
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| Multiple Description Video Coding |
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by
Andrea Vitali (STMicroelectronics)
Copyright
Copyright © STMicroelectronics |
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Abstract
The goal of Multiple Description (MD) is to create several independent bitstreams. The more bitstreams decoded, the larger the output video quality. MD has several advantages: error resilience is greatly improved, variable bandwidth/throughput can be simply managed by transmitting a suitable number of descriptions, and multipaths can be exploited. However, coding efficiency is somewhat reduced depending on the amount of redundancy left among subsequences.
There are many techniques used to create MD. Among these, the one based on Polyphase Downsampling (PDMD) can be easily implemented using state-of-the-art video codecs. This is the approach followed by STM. In this paper, several patented enhancements over classical PDMD will be presented: joint PDMD decoding, joint PDMD encoding, and PDMD combined with frame expansion.
Performance and complexity will be discussed in detail. Comparisons with error resilient single description (SD) and with SD protected by Forward Error Correction (SD+FEC) will also be made. |
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