Error-resilient scalable compression based on distributed video coding

Distributed Video Coding (DVC) is a new paradigm for video compression based on the information theoretical results of Slepian–Wolf (SW) and Wyner–Ziv (WZ). In this work, a performance analysis of image and video coding schemes based on DVC is presented, addressing temporal, quality and spatial scalability. More specifically, conventional coding is used to obtain a base layer while WZ coding generates the enhancement layers. At the decoder, the base layer is used to construct Side Information (SI) for the DVC decoding process. Initially, we show that the scalable DVC approach is codec-independent, which means that it is independent from the method used to encode the base layer. Moreover, the influence of the base layer quality on the overall performance of the schemes is studied. Finally, evaluation of the proposed schemes is performed in both cases, with and without transmission errors. The simulation results show that scalable DVC has a lower compression efficiency than conventional scalable coding (i.e. scalable video coding and JPEG2000 for video and image, respectively) in error-free conditions. On the other hand, the DVC-based schemes show better error resilience as they outperform conventional scalable coding in error-prone conditions. More specifically, the Rate Distortion (RD) performance of the proposed schemes for image coding is compared with respect to Reed Solomon (RS) protected JPEG2000. While the latter exhibits a cliff effect as its performance dramatically decreases after a certain error rate, the performance of the DVC-based schemes decreases in a steady way with error rate increase.