Region-Based Adaptive Distributed Video Coding

—the practical application of DVC is referred to as Wyner-Ziv video coding (WZ) where the side information available at the decoder is an estimate of the original frame. The compression is achieved by sending the information that is needed to correct this estimation. Due to the limitation of side information prediction, the predicted frame is expected to have various degree of success along the predicted frame. In this work, we propose partitioning the considered frame into many coding units (region) where each unit is encoded differently. This partitioning is, however, done at the decoder while generating the side-information and the region map is sent over to encoder at very little rate penalty. The partitioning allows allocation of appropriate DVC coding parameters (virtual channel, rate, and quantizer) to each region. The proposed solution preserves the simplicity of the video encoder by performing the frame partitioning process at the decoder during side information generation process. Experimental results show that adaptive DVC parameters selection per region enhances the overall PSNR when compared with frame based. I. INTRODUCTION Today's digital video coding paradigm represented by the ITU-T and MPEG standards mainly relies on a hybrid of block-based transform and inter-frame predictive coding approaches. In this coding framework, the encoder exploits both the temporal and spatial redundancies present in the video sequence, which is a complex process and it requires a noticeable amount of resources (power and memory). As a result, all standard video encoders have much higher computational complexity than the decoder (typically five to ten times more complex) [1], mainly due to the temporal correlation exploitation tools, especially due to the motion estimation task. Recently new emerging applications such as wireless low-power surveillance and multimedia sensor networks, wireless PC cameras and mobile camera phones, might not afford the encoding complexity. But still require attaining the coding efficiency gained by the motion estimation /compensation algorithm. As a result, the