Multiple Description Coding using Whitening Ttansform

In the communications systems with diversity, we are commonly faced on needing of new source coding technique, error resilient coding. The error resilient coding addresses the coding algorithm that has the robustness to unreliability of communications channel. In recent years, many error resilient coding techniques were proposed such as data partitioning, resynchronization, error detection, concealment, reference picture selection and multiple description coding (MDC). Especially, the MDC using correlating transform explicitly adds correlation between two descriptions to enable the estimation of one set from the other. However, in the conventional correlating transform method, there is a critical problem that decoder must know statistics of original image. In this paper, we propose an enhanced method, the MDC using whitening transform that is not necessary additional statistical information to decode image because the DCT coefficients to apply whitening transform to an image have uni-variance statistics. Our experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a good trade-off between the coding efficiency and the reconstruction quality. In the proposed method, the PSNR of images reconstructed from two descriptions is about 0.7dB higher than conventional method at the 1.0 BPP and from only one description is about 1,8dB higher at the same rate.