Distributed Video Coding With MIMO for Video Wireless Communications

The research on distributed video coding (DVC) has been increasingly popular in recent times due to its promising features. In video communications over wireless channels, the noise and multipath fading effects have a significant effect on the perceptual video quality. However, it is noted that in all the research literature on DVC, an error free ideal communication channel is assumed. In this paper, we take into account the effects of noise and fading in a wireless channel on the performance of a DVC codec with necessary modifications to the decoding algorithm while proposing a multiple-in-multiple-out (MIMO) based diversity scheme. Simulation results show that the proposed DVC system with 2×2 MIMO channel outperformed the state of the art H.264/AVC video codec at channel SNR levels below 16 dB under similar conditions. Further, possible enhancements to the MIMO configuration are also discussed in this paper.