An improvement to multiple description transform coding

A multiple description transform coding (MDTC) method has been reported previously. The redundancy rate distortion (RRD) performance of this coding scheme for the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d) two-dimensional (2-D) Gaussian source has been analyzed using mean squared error (MSE) as the distortion measure. At the small redundancy region, the MDTC scheme can achieve excellent RRD performance because a small increase in redundancy can reduce the single description distortion at a rate faster than exponential, but the performance of MDTC becomes increasingly poor at larger redundancies. This paper describes a generalization of the MDTC (GMDTC) scheme, which introduces redundancy both by transform and through correcting the error resulting from a single description. Its RRD performance is closer to the theoretical bound in the entire range of redundancy. Analysis both for a single pair of variables and for multiple variables is presented.