Multiple description coding using multiple reference frame for robust video transmission

Multiple description coding is an error-resilient coding method that encodes a video sequence into several bitstreams, called descriptions. The main problem of multiple description coding is the mismatch of reference frames in encoder and decoder, when the descriptions are lost during transmission. The mismatch is also referred as drift and can be alleviated efficiently by transmitting side information along with each description. In this paper, we introduce a new generation scheme for side information, which is based on multiple reference frame. For each encoding frame, two previously encoded frames are used as reference frames in motion prediction. And the prediction results of two reference frames will be encoded as descriptions and side information respectively. When transmission error occurs in either reference frames, the decoder can use the correctly received reference frame in decoding. The simulation results prove that the proposed method can improve video quality obviously along different macroblock loss rates.