Distributed video coding: A promising solution for distributed wireless video sensors or not?

Low-power and low-cost distributed wireless video sensors play important roles for applications in machine-to-machine (M2M) and wireless sensor networks. Distributed video coding (DVC), an emerging coding technology based on Wyner-Ziv theory, seems to be a possible solution for implementing low-power video sensors since most of the computational complexity is moved from the encoder to the decoder. In this paper, existing works on DVC are discussed with rate-distortion and power consumption analyses compared with H.264/AVC-based approaches. We show that, since more transmission power is required for compensating the lower rate-distortion performance, the power consumption of sensor nodes using DVC is just similar to that of using H.264/AVC with zero motion vectors. Therefore, there is still a room for improvement to make DVC applicable for distributed wireless video sensors. Based on our analysis results, several possible research directions, such as studies on the trade- off between hardware cost and system power consumption, are also addressed in this paper under a unified DVC framework.