Low Complex Key Frame Encoding with High Quality Wyner-Ziv Coding

In this paper, we propose a novel concept for key frame encoding in distributed video codecs (DVC) without using any additional coding scheme. The proposed concept is an extension of Wyner-Ziv coding for key frame coding. Since key frames are used in the prediction purposes, the quality of them is critical in the DVC codecs. Therefore we use a fine quantizer (high quality) to encode these key frames. Side information is generated as in the conventional DVC codecs for Wyner-Ziv frames and the decoder requests parity information from the encoder based on this side information until it decodes the complete frame with a predetermined picture quality. Simulation results show that, up to 8 dB PSNR gain can be obtained with the proposed algorithm over H.264 intra frame encoding at the same bit rate