Multiple descriptions encoding of images

Summary form only given. The authors consider the following multiterminal data compression problem. An image is to be compressed and transmitted to a destination over a set of unreliable links. If only one of the links is functional (i.e. data transmitted over all other links is completely lost), we would like to be able to reconstruct a low resolution version of our original image. If more links are functional, we would like the image quality to improve. Finally, with all links functioning, we desire a high resolution, possibly lossless reconstruction of the original image. Motivating applications for this problem are briefly discussed. We present conceptually simple and computationally efficient schemes that are useful in these applications. The schemes can be implemented as simple pre-processing and post-processing operations on existing image compression algorithms.