Distributed video coding with progressive significance map

A distributed video coding (DVC) system based on wavelet transform and set partition coding (SPC) is presented in this paper. Conventionally the significance map (sig-map) of SPC is not conducive to Slepian-Wolf (SW) coding, because of the difficulty of generating a side information sig-map and the sensitivity to decoding errors. The proposed DVC system utilizes a higher structured significance map, named progressive significance map (prog-sig-map), which structures the significance information into two parts: a high-level summation significance map (sum-sig-map) and a low-level complementary significance map (comp-sig-map). This prog-sig-map alleviates the above difficulties and thus makes part of the prog-sig-map (specifically, the fixed-length-coded comp-sig-map) suitable for SW coding. Simulation results are provided showing the improved rate-distortion performance of the DVC system even with a simple system configuration.