Multiple Description Coding of Images using Phase Scrambling

Phase scrambling as discussed in this paper, spreads the information in each pixel of an image among virtually all the pixels of the resulted scrambled image. This property can be exploited in multiple description coding of images where the loss of one or many descriptions is a common case. In this paper, we employ phase scrambling, as a form of all-pass filtering to mix the information of each pixel with all the pixels of the image, followed by decomposing the scrambled image into multiple descriptions. Our experiments show that this technique is competitive to other proposed methods such as Lapped Orthogonal Transforms. Phase scrambling as suggested in this article does not produce localized visual artifacts such as ringing and blocking effects and does not require complex post-filtering to yield acceptable reconstruction quality. Another advantage of phase scrambling is that the scrambling can be implemented in hardware and be performed in real time.