Flat multi-scalable coding for failure-free video transmission

The conventional full-redundant duplicate transmission scheme, which is often adopted in video transmission that requires high reliability such as contribution and primary distribution, has a drawback in that the efficiency of utilization of transmission links is low. In order to improve this, it would be effective to realize "flat multi-scalable video transmission", in which the picture can be reconstructed by using any single channel, while combining more than one channel leads to the reconstruction of the picture with even higher quality. In this paper, for this purpose, the authors propose a "complementary sampling method". In this method, the improvement in picture quality is achieved by cancelling out the coding noise which is included in more than one channel. Moreover, it is shown that in this scheme, the objective assessment of picture quality can be performed based only on the received pictures. The authors hope that this study will help to construct a visual communication system with high efficiency and high reliability.