Two-Terminal Video Coding

Following recent works on the rate region of the quadratic Gaussian two-terminal source coding problem and limit-approaching code designs, this paper examines multiterminal source coding of two correlated, i.e., stereo, video sequences to save the sum rate over independent coding of both sequences. Two multiterminal video coding schemes are proposed. In the first scheme, the left sequence of the stereo pair is coded by H.264/AVC and used at the joint decoder to facilitate Wyner–Ziv coding of the right video sequence. The first I-frame of the right sequence is successively coded by H.264/AVC Intracoding and Wyner–Ziv coding. An efficient stereo matching algorithm based on loopy belief propagation is then adopted at the decoder to produce pixel-level disparity maps between the corresponding frames of the two decoded video sequences on the fly. Based on the disparity maps, side information for both motion vectors and motion-compensated residual frames of the right sequence are generated at the decoder before Wyner–Ziv encoding. In the second scheme, source splitting is employed on top of classic and Wyner–Ziv coding for compression of both I-frames to allow flexible rate allocation between the two sequences. Experiments with both schemes on stereo video sequences using H.264/AVC, LDPC codes for Slepian–Wolf coding of the motion vectors, and scalar quantization in conjunction with LDPC codes for Wyner–Ziv coding of the residual coefficients give a slightly lower sum rate than separate H.264/AVC coding of both sequences at the same video quality.