Video coding scheme using irregular binning and iterative decoding

We propose a novel video coding scheme requiring a simple encoder and a complex decoder where video frames are intra-coded periodically and frames in between successive intra-coded frames are coded efficiently using a proposed irregular binning technique. We investigate a method of forming an irregular binning which is capable of quantizing any value effectively with only small number of bins, by exploiting the correlation between successive frames. This correlation is additionally exploited at the decoder, where the quality of reconstructed frames is enhanced gradually by applying POCS (projection on the convex sets). After an image frame is reconstructed with the irregular binning information at the proposed decoder, we can further improve the resulting quality by modifying the reconstructed image with motion-compensated image components from the neighboring frames. In the proposed decoder, several iterations of these modification and re-projection steps can be invoked. Experimental results show that the performance of the proposed coding scheme is comparable to that of H.264/AVC coding in IB mode. Since the proposed video coding does not require motion estimation at the encoder, it can be considered as an alternative for some versions of H.264/AVC in applications requiring a simple encoder.