Complexity-constrained rate-distortion optimization of Wyner-Ziv video coding

Abstract

Wyner-Ziv video coding has been widely investigated in recent years. The main characteristic of Wyner-Ziv coding is that side information is available only to the decoder. Many current Wyner-Ziv video coding schemes encode the sequences using two approaches which separate the frames into what are known as key frames and Wyner-Ziv frames. Key frames are encoded using conventional video coding methods and Wyner-Ziv frames are encoded using channel coding techniques. At the decoder, the reconstructed key frames serve as the side information used to reconstruct the Wyner-Ziv frames. We have previously presented a Wyner-Ziv scheme that uses backward-channel-aware motion estimation to encode the key frames, where motion estimation was performed at the decoder and motion information was transmitted back to the encoder. We refer to these backward predictively coded frames as BP frames. In this paper, we extend our previous work to describe three types of motion estimators. We present a model to examine the analytical complexity-rate-distortion performance of BP frames for the three motion estimators.