BALANCED MULTIPLE DESCRIPTION SUBBAND CODING

Multiple description coding is one of the source coding techniques used to alleviate the problems of packet loss in network. The objective is to encode a source into two (or more) bitstreams supporting two quality levels of decoding: A high-quality reconstruction decoded from the two bitstreams together, and two lower ones, but still acceptable, decoded from either of the two bitstreams individually. Most of the earlier works concentrated on the trade-off between redundancy and average side distortion, which is insufficient to evaluate the system performance. In this paper, we discuss the difference in quality between the two side reconstructions, which is defined as the balance eccentric modulus of the coding system. A scenario to design balanced multiple description coding system is presented. Application to the popular first-order autoregressive model yields encouraging results.