Improving transform domain Wyner-Ziv video coding performance

Distributed video coding (DVC) is a new video coding paradigm based on two key Information Theory results: the Slepian-Wolf and Wyner-Ziv theorems. A particular case of DVC, the so-called Wyner-Ziv coding, deals with lossy source coding with side information at the decoder and enables a flexible allocation of complexity between the encoder and the decoder. This paper proposes an improved transform domain Wyner-Ziv video codec including: 1) the integer block-based transform defined in the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard, 2) a quantizer with a symmetrical interval around zero for AC coefficients, and a quantization step size adjusted to the transform coefficient bands dynamic range, and finally and 3) advanced frame interpolation for side information generation. The combination of these tools brings significant rate-distortion (RD) gains regarding the state-of-the-art results available in the literature.