Performance comparison of Multiple Description Coding and Scalable video coding

For a video server, providing a good quality of service to highly diversified users is a challenging task because different users have different link conditions and different requirement of quality and demand. Multiple Description Coding (MDC) and Scalable video coding (SVC) are the two technical methods for quality adaptation to operate over a wide range of quality of service in heterogeneous requirements. Both are techniques of coding a video sequence in a way that multiple levels of quality can be obtained depending on the parts of the video bit stream that are received. For Scalable video coding special protection is mad for the base layer using Forward Error Protection while the streams (descriptions) in multiple description coding has been tested to simulate the advantages of diversity systems where each sub-stream has an equal probability of being correctly decoded. In this paper, the performance comparison of the two coding approaches is made by using DCT coefficients in generating the base layer and enhancement Layers for SVC and Descriptions for MDC with respect to their perspective achievements in image quality and Compression Ratio. Simulation results show that MDC out performs SVC in both cases.