(An) adaptive two-stage side information generation method for transform domain Wyner-Ziv video coding

Abstract

Wyner-Ziv (WZ) video coding is a particular case of Distributed Video Coding (DVC), which is a recent video coding paradigm based on the Slepian-Wolf and Wyner-Zip (WZ) theorems. Contrary to available prediction-based standard video codecs, WZ video coding exploits the source statistics at the decoder, allowing the development of simpler encoders. Until now, WZ video coding did not reach the compression efficiency performance of conventional video coding solutions, mainly due to the poor quality of the side information, which is an estimate of the original frame created at the decoder in the most popular WZ video codecs. Therefore, we propose an adaptive Two-Stage Side Information (TSSI) generation method for a transform domain WZ video coding where the side information is successively improved as the decoding proceeds. Moreover, we propose the Priority-based Reference Frame Selection (PRFS) method for fast motion estimation in the H.264/AVC, which is used to implement DVC to H.264/AVC transcoder. The experimental results for TSSI show significant and consistent rate-distortion performance improvements under complex test sequences with high motion and occlusion. Also, the proposed PRFS significantly reduces the computational complexity for the multiple reference-frame motion estimation of the H.264/AVC encoder and achieves similar coding performance to that of previous methods.