Two-description distributed video coding for robust transmission

In this article, a two-description distributed video coding (2D-DVC) is proposed to address the robust video transmission of low-power capturers. The odd/even frame-splitting partitions a video into two sub-sequences to produce two descriptions. Each description consists of two parts, where part 1 is a zero-motion based H.264-coded bitstream of a sub-sequence and part 2 is a Wyner-Ziv (WZ)-coded bitstream of the other sub-sequence. As the redundant part, the WZ-coded bitstream guarantees that the lost sub-sequence is recovered when one description is lost. On the other hand, the redundancy degrades the rate-distortion performance as no loss occurs. A residual 2D-DVC is employed to further improve the rate-distortion performance, where the difference of two subsequences is WZ encoded to generate part 2 in each description. Furthermore, an optimization method is applied to control an appropriate amount of redundancy and therefore facilitate the tuning of central/side distortion tradeoff. The experimental results show that the proposed schemes achieve better performance than the referenced one especially for low-motion videos. Moreover, our schemes still maintain low-complexity encoding property.