Challenges in practical deployment of distributed video coding

Today, several predictive video coding standards including MPEG2, MPEG4, H.264, VC1, DivX, VP6 and VP8 do exists. By design, the decoder is typically 10× lower complex than encoder. There are certain classes of emerging applications and services including mobile video, wireless camera, wireless low power surveillance, mobile document scanner and disposable video cameras, which demands lower complexity encoder, even at the expense of high complexity decoder. Distributed Video Coding (DVC) has emerged as ground-breaking revolution for the said emerging applications and services. The innovative DVC solution brings-in channel coding concepts into source coding problem. Though DVC started to emerge from the year 2002 and despite of extensive research work worldwide, there are still several challenges in practical deployment of DVC. This paper highlights key challenges in practical deployment of DVC, based on extensive research work done and reference models developed over several years by the author.