DEDICATION To God , My Parents , and My Sister iii

Distributed coding is a new paradigm for video transmission, based on the Wyner-Ziv theorem. In this thesis, a new Wyner-Ziv codec was proposed using non-binary Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes. Non-binary LDPC codes, developed for use in channel coding, have been extended for source coding to compress correlated non-binary sources, such as video. The approach is based on considering the correlation as a virtual q-ary symmetric channel and applying the syndrome concept. The system considered focused on the compression of a equiprobable memoryless non-binary source with side information at the decoder. Results obtained through simulations demonstrated that for rates 1/2 and 3/4, the non-binary compression scheme performed better than the equivalent binary compression scheme. The nonbinary scheme, when extended for distributed video coding, produced the original frame with negligible error.