Exploring DCV Side Information Based on Various Schemes

Distributed video coding (DVC) is considered to be a potential solution for various applications, e.g. wireless multimedia sensor networks, mobile devices, owing to the feature of easy encoding/complex decoding. However, practical DVC systems still have a rate distortion (RD) performance gap with respect to the traditional video coding standards with complex encoding/easy decoding. Side information, created at the DVC decoder as the temporal prediction for the current Wyner-Ziv (WZ) frame, is of great importance for improving the RD performance of DVC. This paper firstly compares the SI used by DVC and the traditional video coding standards respectively. The comparison reveals that the information and the way to exploit the information used in the SI generation are the most important factors affecting the system's performance. According to the types of information used in SI creation, the related papers and patents are roughly classified into three classes: using the external-info (the previous decoded frames at the decoder), using the extrainfo (the information extracted at the encoder and sent to the decoder), and the main-info (the parity bits of the current WZ frame and the main signal of transmission). The various methods of exploiting the three types of information to generate SI are surveyed and discussed. Finally some future potential developments are concluded.