Matching pursuits based multiple description video coding for lossy environments

Multiple description coding (MDC) is an error resilient source coding scheme that creates multiple descriptions of the source with the aim of providing an acceptable reconstruction quality when only one description is received, and improved quality as more descriptions become available. Recently, we developed a matching pursuit multiple description video coder (MP-MDVC) based on a three loop structure originally proposed by Reibman and her colleagues (MTDC). While the MP-MDVC outperforms the discrete cosine transform based MTDC, it is not optimized for lossy environments. In this paper, we extend MP-MDVC by considering the network loss characteristics when coding multiple descriptions. In particular, we propose a fast steepest descent algorithm for creating multiple descriptions that results in minimum expected distortion, given network outage probability, bandwidth constraints, and maximum allowable distortion for each description. Analytical and experimental results show that by taking network loss characteristics into account, our approach outperforms existing MP-MDVC techniques.