Inter-bit prediction based on maximum likelihood estimate for distributed video coding

摘要

Distributed Video Coding (DVC) is an emerging video coding paradigm for the systems that require low complexity encoders supported by high complexity decoders. A typical real world application for a DVC system is mobile phones with video capture hardware that have a limited encoding capability supported by base-stations with a high decoding capability. Generally speaking, a DVC system operates by dividing a source image sequence into two streams, key frames and Wyner-Ziv (W) frames, with the key frames being used to represent the source plus an approximation to the W frames called S frames (where S stands for side information), while the W frames are used to correct the bit errors in the S frames. This paper presents an effective algorithm to reduce the bit errors in the side information of a DVC system. The algorithm is based on the maximum likelihood estimation to help predict future bits to be decoded. The reduction in bit errors in turn reduces the number of parity bits needed for error correction. Thus, a higher coding efficiency is achieved since fewer parity bits need to be transmitted from the encoder to the decoder. The algorithm is called inter-bit prediction because it predicts the bit-plane to be decoded from previously decoded bit-planes, one bit-plane at a time, starting from the most significant bit-plane. Results provided from experiments using real-world image sequences show that the inter-bit prediction algorithm does indeed reduce the bit rate by up to 13% for our test sequences. This bit rate reduction corresponds to a PSNR gain of about 1.6 dB for the W frames.