Adaptive mode decision with residual motion compensation for distributed video coding

Distributed video coding (DVC) is a coding paradigm that entails low complexity encoding by exploiting the source statistics at the decoder. To improve the DVC coding efficiency, this paper proposes a novel adaptive technique for mode decision to control and take advantage of skip mode and intra mode in DVC. The adaptive mode decision is not only based on quality of key frames but also the rate of Wyner-Ziv (WZ) frames. To improve noise distribution estimation for a more accurate mode decision, a residual motion compensation is proposed to estimate a current noise residue based on a previously decoded frame. The experimental results show that the proposed adaptive mode decision DVC significantly improves the rate distortion performance without increasing the encoding complexity. For a GOP size of 2 on the set of test sequences, the average bitrate saving of the proposed codec is 35.5% on WZ frames compared with the DISCOVER codec.