Improved Wyner-Ziv video coding efficiency using bit plane prediction

Distributed Video Coding (DVC) is a coding paradigm where video statistics are exploited, partially or totally, at the decoder. The performance of such a codec depends on the accuracy of the soft-input information estimated at the decoder, which is affected by the quality of the side information (SI) and the dependency model. This paper studies the discrepancies between the bit planes of the Wyner-Ziv (WZ) frames and the corresponding bit planes of the SI. The relationship between these discrepancies is then exploited to predict the locations where the bit plane of the SI is expected to differ from that of the original WZ frame. This information is then used to derive more accurate soft-input values that achieve better compression efficiencies. Simulation results demonstrate that a WZ bit-rate reduction of 9.4% is achieved for a given video quality.