Low-complexity Bayer-pattern video compression using distributed video coding

Most consumer digital color cameras capture video using a single chip. Single chip cameras do not capture RGB triples for every pixel, but a subsampled version with only one color component per pixel (e.g. Bayer pattern). Conventionally, a full resolution video is constructed from the Bayer pattern by demosaicing before being converted to YUV domain for compression. In order to lower the encoding complexity, we propose in this work a novel color space conversion in the pre-processing step. Compared to the conventional method, the proposed scheme reduces the encoding complexity almost by half. Moreover, it improves the reconstructed video quality by up to 1.5 dB in CPSNR, when H.264/AVC is used for compression. To further lower the encoding complexity, we additionally use our Wyner-Ziv video coder for compression. Again, we observe in our experiments a similar gain of the proposed scheme over the conventional one.