Multiple Description Coding Schemes for the H.264/AVC Coder

Abstract- The recent development of multimedia commu-nications across unreliable channels has brought the need for robust coding techniques, such that a partial loss of in-formation does not necessarily imply the loss of the whole video sequence. The implementation of Multiple Descrip-tion Coding (MDC) schemes based on the H.264/AVC cod-ing standard provides an affordable solution to this problem. This paper presents some MDC schemes that differently exploit the correlation (spatial or temporal) of a video se-quence. Several efforts were made in order to develop H.264/AVC standard-compliant MD coders. Finally, the ca-pabilities of the different schemes are evaluated and com-pared. Keywords- multiple description coding, video coding, transform coding, H.264, MPEG-4 part 10, rate control, buffer control, coefficients statistics. I