An MDSQ-based seamless MDVC in P2P

Multiple-description coding (MDC) is a source coding technique which provides an effective way to mitigate the effects of packet errors/loses by making use of multiple channels. The most attractive application of MDC is perhaps the multiple-description video coding (MDVC) in the peer-to-peer (P2P) scenario so as to support simultaneous video streaming to a large population of clients. To this end, a number of MDVC schemes (both non-scalable and scalable) have been proposed in the past few years. However, almost all non-scalable schemes would suffer from the prediction mismatch between the references used at the encoder and decoder sides (for motion compensation); whereas most scalable schemes (involving a base-layer and some enhancement layers) would suffer from the inter-dependency within the enhancement-layer information. In this paper, we keep a common base-layer in all descriptions and propose some novel design of multiple-description scalar quantizer (MDSQ) that is applied on the enhancement-layer. As a result, this scheme can overcome the above drawbacks and more importantly achieve the seamless streaming among all peers.