A study of encoding and decoding techniques for syndrome-based video coding

In conventional video coding, the complexity of an encoder is generally much higher than that of a decoder because of operations such as motion estimation consume significant computational resources. Such codec architecture is suitable for downlink transmission model of broadcast. However, in the contemporary applications of mobile wireless video uplink transmission, it is desirable to have low complexity video encoder to meet the resource limitations on the mobile devices. Recent advances in distributed video source coding provide potential reverse in computational complexity for encoder and decoder [1], [2]. Various studies are done within a context of a scheme that is similar in spirit to that in [2]. In this paper, we conduct a study of encoding and decoding techniques of syndrome-based video encoding scheme for mobile wireless applications. The innovation of this study is the adoption of low resolution low quality reference frames for motion estimation at the decoder. To accomplish the goal of reducing computational complexity while maintaining good reconstruction quality at the decoder, we investigate the following related strategies: (1) compression of low resolution and low quality sequence; (2) rate-distortion study with complexity constraints at the encoder; (3) building enhanced evidences for syndrome decoder. Extensive experimental results have confirmed the effectiveness these techniques for syndrome based video coding.