Adaptive multiple description coding for Internet video

Transmission of compressed video over unreliable networks such as the Internet will inevitably result in serious degradations in video quality. Therefore, multiple description coding (MDC) encodes the video signal into a number of bit streams (descriptions) such that receiving a description improves the video quality. Among the different MDC schemes, spatial/temporal sub-sampling is a low complexity encoding/decoding scheme, however these MDC schemes are vulnerable to varying channel conditions and visual content. To guarantee better image quality during transmission, we propose an adaptive scheme that alternates between two simple MDC schemes depending on the channel status and underlying visual content. The proposed scheme achieves substantial robustness over packet lossy networks. Furthermore, a multilayer perceptron (MLP) network is designed to provide an on-line decision mechanism with 85% accuracy. Experimental results suggest that our approach can achieve a superior video quality for a wide range of packet loss and video content.