Distributed multiview video coding with 3D-DCT transform domain Wyner-Ziv codec

The need for efficient multiview video coding schemes is expected to strongly increase in the near future. The distributed multiview video coding (DMVC) approach seems very promising since it can achieve good compression efficiency while keeping the complexity low. The main contribution of this paper is to investigate how to improve the classic DMVC framework based on transform domain WZ video coding (TDWZ) by means of the introduction of the 3D-DCT. The main advantage of this combination resides in the limited computational complexity of the overall framework, which however does not penalise the compression performance since both the spatial and the temporal domain correlation can be exploited due to the use of the 3D-DCT. The framework is designed in a flexible way so that it can handle both traditional and residual-frame-based WZ coding. The simulation results confirm the validity of the proposed framework in terms of video quality improvements, with gains up to 4.4 dB PSNR compared to a pixel domain WZ technique, and up to 0.6 dB PSNR compared to a 2D-DCT-based one.