A distributed video coder based on the H.264/AVC standard

Abstract

One of the latest innovations in the world of multimedia technologies is the application of Distributed Source Coding (DSC) theory to the robust transmission of video sequences. However, these DSC-based video encoders are usually characterized by a lower compression gain with respect to their hybrid counterparts. In this work, we investigate achieving H.264-like high compression efficiency with a DSC-based approach without constraints on encoding complexity. In this way, highly non-stationary video data are modelled through coarse low-cost Motion Estimation, and this allows us to obtain a good compression efficiency together with a certain robustness to channel errors and losses. Experimental results show that in presence of losses the presented algorithm permits a better quality with respect to H.264/AVC.