Bitplane Based Wyner-Ziv Coding using Unequal Error Protection

In this paper, we discuss a novel approach to distributed video coding (DVC) using bitplane based unequal error protection. Distributed video coding (DVC) has recently attracted a vast amount of attention from the video coding community all around the world, since it could prove very well suited for some applications where low-complexity encoders are a must. The primary feature of DVC is its modified complexity balance in the encoder and decoder, in contrast to its traditional competitors. When considering each pixel of the frame, out of the 8 bits it constitutes, each bit position has a different significance decreasing gradually from the MSB to the LSB. Therefore a scheme which protects the initial bitplanes better would undoubtedly be desirable. Here we propose to protest each bitplane considering its significance using variable memory length in the encoder. Since increasing the memory length results in higher computational complexity, the optimum mix of the memory length is to be evaluated for the codec to operate within the conceptual restrictions of low-complex encoder in DVC. In this paper, the proposed codec is compared for peformance with another DVC codec which uses a fixed memory length over the whole sequence with comparable complexity. Simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms its fixed memory length counterpart t by a significant margin