Achieving H.264-like compression efficiency with distributed video coding

Recently, a new class of distributed source coding (DSC) based video coders has been proposed to enable low-complexity encoding. However, to date, these low-complexity DSC-based video encoders have been unable to compress as efficiently as motion-compensated predictive coding based video codecs, such as H.264/AVC, due to insufficiently accurate modeling of video data. In this work, we examine achieving H.264-like high compression efficiency with a DSC-based approach without the encoding complexity constraint. The success of H.264/AVC highlights the importance of accurately modeling the highly non-stationary video data through fine-granularity motion estimation. This motivates us to deviate from the popular approach of approaching the Wyner-Ziv bound with sophisticated capacity-achieving channel codes that require long block lengths and high decoding complexity, and instead focus on accurately modeling video data. Such a DSC-based, compression-centric encoder is an important first step towards building a robust DSC-based video coding framework.