On Predictive Coding for Erasure Channels Using a Kalman Framework

We present a new design method for robust low-delay coding of auto-regressive (AR) sources for transmission across erasure channels. The method is based on Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) with Kalman estimation at the decoder. The method designs the encoder and decoder off-line through an iterative algorithm based on minimization of the trace of the decoder state error covariance. The design method applies to stationary AR sources of any order. Simulation results show considerable performance gains, when the transmitted quantized prediction errors are subject to loss, in terms of Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) compared to the same coding framework optimized for no loss. We furthermore investigate the impact on decoding performance when channel losses are correlated. We find that the method still provides substantial improvements in this case despite being designed for i.i.d. losses.