Low Complexity Multiple Description Coding for H.264/AVC

Today's wireless networks suffer from high error rates in real-life conditions. Moreover errors tend to occur in large bursts. Multiple Description Coding (MDC) of digital video is a promising technique to overcome these problems in wireless environments by taking advantage of frequency or channel diversity. This papers proposes two low complexity MDC techniques for H.264/AVC at the Network Abstraction Layer level, aiming at conversational (video teleconferencing) and sports Video on Demand (VoD) application scenarios, respectively. For conversational applications, an MDC scheme based on H.264/AVC data partitioning is used, offering low additional delay and good performance for video with static backgrounds. For the sports VoD application, a scheme based on redundant slices is proposed. The latter scheme performs better for high-motion sequences than the former, but also introduces more delay.