An enhancement of leaky prediction layered video coding

In this paper, we focus on leaky prediction layered video coding (LPLC). LPLC includes a scaled version of the enhancement layer within the motion compensation (MC) loop to improve the coding efficiency while maintaining graceful recovery in the presence of error drift. However, there exists a deficiency inherent in the LPLC structure, namely that the reconstructed video quality from both the enhancement layer and the base layer cannot be guaranteed to be always superior to that of using the base layer alone, even when no drift occurs. In this paper, we: 1) highlight this deficiency using a formulation that describes LPL; 2) propose a general framework that applies to both LPLC and a multiple description coding scheme using MC and we use this framework to further confirm the existence of the deficiency in LPLC; and 3) furthermore, we propose an enhanced LPLC based on maximum-likelihood estimation to address the previously specified deficiency in LPLC. We then show how our new method performs compared to LPLC.