A Distributed Coding-Based Content-Aware Multi-View Video System

Compared to traditional mono-view systems, stereo or in general multi-view systems provide interesting additional information about a captured scene, which can significantly facilitate content extraction. This property makes them very useful for many emerging applications, such as 3D TV and video surveillance. However, the use of such systems has been limited so far because of the processing time and bandwidth requirements for multi-view data. These major drawbacks can only be relieved by the development of dedicated algorithms. In this paper, we present an efficient, flexible and content-aware coding method for a multi-view video system. The framework consists of a central processor and camera, completed by a flexible number of smart Wyner-Ziv cameras. The latter ones provide a content-aware representation of their viewpoint, thus greatly reducing the amount of data to be sent to the central processor. By employing Distributed Video (DV) coding, i.e. joint decoding of the independently encoded frames of the different cameras, we achieve good coding efficiency without inter-camera communication.