Multiple description coding for stereoscopic videos with stagger frame order

Due to the prediction structures employed in video coding, the loss of one packet will affect many following frames. In this paper, a multiple description coding scheme with stagger frame order is proposed for stereoscopic 3-D videos. First, the reference and auxiliary views in stereoscopic sequences will be asymmetrically encoded into one description, whereas the other description will be formed in the same way with one dumb frame delay. Because of the stagger frame order, the coarsely encoded B frames will be inserted into different positions of the two descriptions. If a certain frame encoded with I/P mode is lost, then its corresponding B-frame version will be employed to compensate for the loss. In each description, the quantization steps of B frames are tuned based on a closed-form solution that considers the video contents, network status, frame positions in the group of picture, and the layer of the views. For further improvement, a fusing scheme is provided. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms stateof-the-art schemes. Specifically, up to 1.3-dB gain is achieved in the case of packet loss, and 2-dB gain is obtained for the side/central performance.