Improved multiple description wavelet based image coding using subband uniform quantization

The objective of multiple description coding (MDC) is to encode a source into multiple descriptions supporting different quality levels of reconstruction. In this paper, we use the multiple description transform coding (MDTC) algorithm based on the wavelet transform that has been shown to be robust to packet losses allowing a graceful quality degradation. The case of transmitting still images with four descriptions is considered. We propose to use subband uniform quantization with different quantization steps, optimized using a genetic algorithm (GA), when compressing to a target bit-rate. Simulation results show that the proposed method offers substantial improvements in the case of packet loss when compared to previously reported work that applies uniform quantization with a fixed step size.