Transmission of encoded video sequences over unreliable networks usually requires the adoption of protection techniques to guarantee good reconstruction quality at the receiver side. Multiple Description Coding (MDC) strategies add reliability to real-time video applications, where retransmission is not possible and packet losses afflict several frames degrading the overall quality.
In Multiple Description Coding, the transmitter splits the original signal into several correlated streams, called descriptions, which are sent to the receiver through distinct channels. Whenever all descriptions are correctly received, the signal is completely decoded at full coding quality, while in case of partial loss of some descriptions, lost information is estimated exploiting the correlation between descriptions and a coarse-quality signal is reconstructed.
In this talk, after a brief introduction to video and multiple description coding, applications of MDC to the H.264/AVC standard and Scalable Video will be presented.