Reconstruction for distributed video coding: a Markov random field approach with context-adaptive smoothness prior

An important issue in Wyner-Ziv video coding is the reconstruction of Wyner-Ziv frames with decoded bit-planes. So far, there are two major approaches: the Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) reconstruction and the Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) reconstruction algorithms. However, these approaches do not exploit smoothness constraints in natural images. In this paper, we model a Wyner-Ziv frame by Markov random fields (MRFs), and produce reconstruction results by finding an MAP estimation of the MRF model. In the MRF model, the energy function consists of two terms: a data term, MSE distortion metric in this paper, measuring the statistical correlation between side-information and the source, and a smoothness term enforcing spatial coherence. In order to better describe the spatial constraints of images, we propose a context-adaptive smoothness term by analyzing the correspondence between the output of Slepian-Wolf decoding and successive frames available at decoders. The significance of the smoothness term varies in accordance with the spatial variation within different regions. To some extent, the proposed approach is an extension to the MAP and MMSE approaches by exploiting the intrinsic smoothness characteristic of natural images. Experimental results demonstrate a considerable performance gain compared with the MAP and MMSE approaches.