Estimating side-information for Wyner-Ziv video coding using resolution-progressive decoding and extensive motion exploration

In Wyner-Ziv video coding (WZVC), the quality of side information (SI) has a critical impact on the coding efficiency. Most existing WZVC schemes generate SI using decoder-side motion estimation (ME), where the current frame is unavailable and the ME accuracy is greatly impaired. In this paper, without introducing additional bitrate overhead, we incorporate fractional-pel motion search, reduced block sizes and multiple hypothesis prediction into our previously proposed decoder-side multi-resolution motion refinement framework [1], where the current frame is progressively decoded, and based on which the decoder iteratively refines the motion to improve its accuracy. Theoretical analysis shows significant gain of the combination of these advanced techniques. A practical SI estimator is implemented and provides prediction performance comparable to H.264/AVC.