Adaptive error concealment for temporal–spatial multiple description video coding

• A new MDC is proposed for better coding efficiency and error robustness.
• A four-description MDC based on temporal and spatial splitting is described.
• Adaptive error concealment methods are used to combat packet loss.
• Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed MDC methods.

With the development of 3G/4G and WiFi networks, there has been a growing demand for video delivery over wireless channels. This increase of video traffic creates a significant challenge for efficient, reliable and adaptable video coding techniques. Multiple description coding (MDC) is an error resilient video coding method that has been proposed for streaming applications when retransmission is unacceptable. In this paper, we present error concealment approaches for two different four-description MDC architectures. In our first architecture, four descriptions are generated by temporal–spatial subsampling and encoded independently. To improve the error robustness, several adaptive error concealment methods are described. One of them is a frame-level method based on error tracking. It takes into account the distortion due to error concealment and error propagation. The other methods are macroblock-level methods based on foreground–background mapping and distortion mapping respectively. Our second MDC partition architecture aims at better coding efficiency and improved error robustness. Here spatial partitioning is done after prediction so that each of the two descriptions shares the same prediction loop. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed methods.