Abstract
Despite multiple description coding (MDC) paradigm is effective to combat packet losses on networks, it is not included in any multimedia co-decoding standard. This can be justified by the complexity of the redundancy tuning task of many of the proposed methods. Moreover, the complexity of generating more than two descriptions represents a strong limitation to MDC. In this paper, we generalize the MDC scheme proposed for JPEG 2000 in [1] to more than two descriptions. Using this flexible MDC scheme, we show the importance of properly tuning both the redundancy and the number of descriptions to match the network condition. Finally, we derive the conditions in order to determine when it is better to use single description coding or MDC.