Coordinated application of multiple description scalar quantization and error concealment for error-resilient MPEG video streaming

Historically, multiple description coding (MDC) and postprocessing error concealment (ECN) algorithms have evolved separately. In this paper, we propose a coordinated application of multiple description scalar, quantizers (MDSQ) and ECN, where the smoothness of the video signal helps to compensate for the loss of descriptions. In particular, we perform a reconstruction that is consistent with the data received at the decoder. When only a single description is available, the video is reconstructed in such a way that: 1) if we were to regenerate two descriptions (from the reconstructed video) , one of them would be equivalent to the received description and 2) the reconstructed video is spatiotemporally smooth. Experimental results with several video sequences demonstrated a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) improvement of 0.9-2.8 dB for intracoded frames. The PSNR improvements for intercoded frames were negligible. However, for both cases, the visual improvements were much more striking than what the PSNR improvement suggested.