Extrapolating Side Information for Low-Delay Pixel-Domain Distributed Video Coding

Distributed Video Coding (DVC) is a new video coding approach based on the Wyner-Ziv theorem. Unlike most of the existing video codecs, each frame is encoded separately (either as a key-frame or a Wyner-Ziv frame) which results in a simpler and lighter encoder since complex operations like motion estimation are not performed. The previously decoded frames are used at the decoder to estimate the Wyner-Ziv frames – the frames are coded independently but jointly decoded. To have a low-delay codec, the side information frames (estimation of the Wyner-Ziv frames to be decoded) must be extrapolated from past frames. This paper proposes a robust extrapolation module to generate the side information based on motion field smoothening to provide improved performance in the context of a low-delay pixeldomain DVC codec.