Balanced multiple description subband coding based on multifilter banks

Multiple description coding is one of the source coding techniques to alleviate the problems of packet loss in network. The encoder generates several different descriptions of the source and the decoder can produce a useful reconstruction with any received subset of these descriptions. Most of the earlier works concentrated on redundancy and the average distortion of the single-description reconstructions, which is insufficient to describe the problem. In this paper, a metric of the coding system, balance eccentric modulus, is defined to evaluate the difference in quality between the individual reconstructions. Since the discrete wavelet transform becomes trivial polyphase transform when setting the balance eccentric modulus at zero, we introduce a multiwavelet based scheme instead. Finally, a sufficient condition for balanced multiwavelet based multiple description coding is presented.