The evolution of multiple description coding based on scalar quantization

Multiple Description Coding (MDC) allows for error resilient coding of data. This tutorial paper discusses one of the most popular MDC technologies, namely MDC based on scalar quantization, and its application in scalable coding of multimedia. This concept is illustrated by a fully scalable video coder, based on motion compensated temporal filtering, which incorporates the MDC principle for the encoding of both texture and motion vector data. For such system, we derive the principles of channel-aware MDC rate-allocation, which enables adjusting both the bit-rate and the resilience to errors of the output stream. Such adaptation is performed on-the-fly depending on the channel condition. Experimental results prove the advantages of MDC and the effectiveness of MDC system when transmitting video streams over unreliable networks.