Scalable Video Coding (SVC) was recently standardized as an ex-
tension of the H.264/AVC standard. A scalable coder allows to com-
bine different layers of spatial, temporal and quality scalability, and
is a viable solution for adaptation to user characteristics and net-
work conditions. On the other hand, Multiple description coding
(MDC) can provide error resilience and graceful quality degradation
for transmission over error-prone channels. In this paper, we propose
a video codec that combines the SVC and MDC coding paradigms.
In particular, the enhancement data of the SVC coder are transmitted
using MDC. The resulting fully compatible coder takes advantage of
the efficiency of SVC and of the robustness of MDC techniques. The
effectiveness of the proposed solution is confirmed by experiments.
