Multiple description image coding using several multiple description scalar quantizers
Muhammad Majid, Charith Abhayaratne · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2008
In this paper a multiple description coding (MDC) that uses more than one multiple description scalar quantizer (MDSQ) is presented. The MDSQ merging constraints for joint decoding of descriptions obtained using side quantizers from different MDSQs are presented. In this way, the bit streams from the side quantizers resulting in significantly different rate-distortion properties are jointly decoded as opposed to that of two bit streams of similar rate-distortion performances obtained using a single MDSQ. Rate distortion performances of joint decoding of different description combinations obtained from multiple MDSQs outperforms those obtained from a single MDSQ. Robustness of the proposed approach evaluated under packet erasure channel is higher than that of the conventional approach. In addition to high robustness, we also demonstrate how this scheme is extended to successive side quantizer bin merging that is used to achieve robust quality scalability within an MDC framework.