Generalized multiple description coding through unequal loss protection

We present an approach to the generalized multiple description problem (V.K. Goyal et al., 1998) that is fundamentally different from previously published algorithms. Our approach uses explicit channel coding in the form of unequal loss protection to obtain a solution that incorporates many important properties: it can be used with any progressive source coder; it generates a balanced encoding with information equally dispersed among the descriptions; it adds a quantifiable amount of redundancy; it adapts that amount of redundancy to expected channel conditions; and it can optimize for different distortion measures. These properties allow the system to gradually improve image quality as the number of received descriptions increases. We compare our system to previously published results and show that forward error correction in multiple description coding can surpass them by a significant margin.