Hybrid distributed video coding with frame level coding mode selection

Distributed video coding (DVC), a new video coding paradigm based on Slepian-Wolf and Wyner-Ziv theories, is a promising solution for implementing low-power and low-cost distributed wireless video sensors since most of the computation load is moved from the encoder to the decoder. It has been showed that there is still room to improve the coding efficiency of the current DVC codec. In this paper, we propose a hybrid coding structure with frame-level coding mode selection (CMS) to allow the DVC encoder to flexibly choose channel coding or entropy coding to code each band. The experimental results show the significant improvement on the rate-distortion (R-D) performance with only slight increase in the encoding complexity compared to the DISCOVER codec. The proposed DVC system performs comparably to H.264 No Motion with much lower encoding complexity.