Protection-enhanced scalable video coding with multiple description coding

Compressed image and video transmission needs to be protected because a few transmission errors can make the transmitted bitstream undecodable. Among others, multiple description coding techniques were proposed to protect encoded sequences by dividing the original signal into several chunks of data that are transmitted to the receiver over distinct channels. Several multiple description techniques were proposed for scalable and non-scalable video algorithms. However error protection was never considered as a part of scalability nor it was taken into account while designing the coding algorithm. As a consequence, most of the proposed multiple description coding schemes cannot be fully exploited to preserve the quality of the transmitted sequences over unreliable networks, i.e., some of them require too much resources, while others cannot be used because they cannot be executed in real time. In this paper we present the first development stage of a new scalable video codec designed to add protection scalability to coded sequences in order to adapt to the network status and to provide finer scalability.