Side information improvement in transform-domain distributed video coding

Abdel-Bassir Abou-Elailah (1) , Giovanni Petrazzuoli (1) , Joumana Farah (2) , Marco Cagnazzo (1) , Beatrice Pesquet-Popescu (1) , Frederic Dufaux (1)

1 LTCI - Laboratoire Traitement et Communication de l'Information
2 Holy-Spirit University of Kaslik [Jounieh]

Side Information (SI) has a strong impact on the rate-distortion performance in distributed video coding. The quality of the SI can be impaired when the temporal distance between the neighboring reference frames increases. In this paper, we introduce two novel methods that allow improving the quality of the SI. In the first approach, we propose a new estimation method for the initial SI using backward and forward motion estimation. The second one consists in re-estimating the SI after decoding all WZFs within the current Group of Pictures (GOP). For this purpose, the SI is first successively refined after each decoded DCT band. Then, after decoding all WZFs within the GOP, we adapt the search area to the motion content. Finally, each already decoded WZF is used, along with the neighboring ones, to estimate a new SI closer to the original WZF. This new SI is then used to reconstruct again the WZF with better quality. The experimental results show that, compared to the DISCOVER codec, the proposed method reaches an improvement of up to 3.53 dB in rate-distortion performance (measured with the Bjontegaard metric) for a GOP size of 8.

Mots clés: Distributed video coding; Side information; Rate-distortion performance; Long duration GOP; Adaptive search area

Domaines: Traitement des images [eess.IV]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]

Abdel-Bassir Abou-Elailah, Giovanni Petrazzuoli, Joumana Farah, Marco Cagnazzo, Beatrice Pesquet-Popescu, et al.. Side information improvement in transform-domain distributed video coding. Applications of Digital Image Processing XXXV, SPIE, Aug 2012, San Diego, United States. ⟨hal-01436384⟩