Efficient Correlation Channel Modeling for Transform Domain Wyner-Ziv Video Coding

The increasing demands on low-power, and low-complexity video encoder have been motivating extensive research activities on distributed video coding (DVC) in which the encoder compresses frames without utilizing inter-frame statistical correlation. In DVC encoder, contrary to the conventional video encoder, an error control code compresses the video frames by representing the frames in the form of syndrome bits. In the meantime, the DVC decoder generates side information which is modeled as a noisy version of the original video frames, and a decoder of the error-control code corrects the errors in the side information with the syndrome bits. The noisy observation, i.e., the side information can be understood as the output of a virtual channel corresponding to the orignal video frames, and the conditional probability of the virtual channel model is assumed to follow a Laplacian distribution. Thus, performance improvement of DVC systems depends on performances of the error-control code and the optimal reconstruction step in the DVC decoder. In turn, the performances of two constituent blocks are directly related to a better estimation of the parameter of the correlation channel. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to estimate the parameter of the correlation channel and also a low-complexity version of the proposed algorithm. In particular, the proposed algorithm minimizes squared-error of the Laplacian probability distribution and the empirical observations. Finally, we show that the conventional algorithm can be improved by adopting a confidential window. The proposed algorithm results in PSNR gain up to 1.8 dB and 1.1 dB on Mother and Foreman video sequences, respectively.