Distributed Video Coding: Codec Architecture and Implementation

TL;DR

This paper discusses the architecture and implementation of transform domain distributed video coding, emphasizing low-complexity encoding and improved rate-distortion performance, with results from a C model demonstrating its effectiveness.

Contribution

It introduces a new transform domain DVC architecture and implementation details, advancing low-complexity video encoding techniques based on information theoretic principles.

Findings

Transform domain DVC achieves better rate-distortion performance.

The architecture enables low-complexity encoding suitable for emerging applications.

C model results validate the effectiveness of the proposed DVC approach.

Abstract

Distributed Video Coding (DVC) is a new coding paradigm for video compression, based on Slepian- Wolf (lossless coding) and Wyner-Ziv (lossy coding) information theoretic results. DVC is useful for emerging applications such as wireless video cameras, wireless low-power surveillance networks and disposable video cameras for medical applications etc. The primary objective of DVC is low-complexity video encoding, where bulk of computation is shifted to the decoder, as opposed to low-complexity decoder in conventional video compression standards such as H.264 and MPEG etc. There are couple of early architectures and implementations of DVC from Stanford University[2][3] in 2002, Berkeley University PRISM (Power-efficient, Robust, hIgh-compression, Syndrome-based Multimedia coding)[4][5] in 2002 and European project DISCOVER (DIStributed COding for Video SERvices)[6] in 2007. Primarily there are two types of DVC techniques namely pixel domain and transform domain based. Transform domain design will have better rate-distortion (RD) performance as it exploits spatial correlation between neighbouring samples and compacts the block energy into as few transform coefficients as possible (aka energy compaction). In this paper, architecture, implementation details and "C" model results of our transform domain DVC are presented.