Coalitional Games for Determining Rate Region of Multiple Description Coding

To combat erasure channels, multiple description coding (MDC) introduces diversity at source coding level. Each description provides a coarse reconstruction of source information at destination. As the number of received description increases, the reconstruction quality would be improved. Rate region of MDC is the set of achievable rates for a given set of expected distortions. In this paper, coalitional game theory is proposed as a nontrivial approach for determining rate region of MDC. To this end, elaborate game theoretic analysis is provided. Moreover, Shapley value is utilized to determine each description's rate. As a result, a fair rate adjustment is obtained that comprises entropy and mutual information of original and reconstructed descriptions.