Error Resilience in Current Distributed Video Coding Architectures

Abstract

In distributed video coding the signal prediction is shifted at the decoder side, giving therefore most of the computational complexity burden at the receiver. Moreover, since no prediction loop exists before transmission, an intrinsic robustness to transmission errors has been claimed. This work evaluates and compares the error resilience performance of two distributed video coding architectures. In particular, we have considered a video codec based on the Stanford architecture (DISCOVER codec) and a video codec based on the PRISM architecture. Specifically, an accurate temporal and rate/distortion based evaluation of the effects of the transmission errors for both the considered DVC architectures has been performed and discussed. These approaches have been also compared with H.264/AVC, in both cases of no error protection, and simple FEC error protection. Our evaluations have highlighted in all cases a strong dependence of the behavior of the various codecs to the content of the considered video sequence. In particular, PRISM seems to be particularly well suited for low-motion sequences, whereas DISCOVER provides better performance in the other cases.

Distributed video coding for wireless video sensor networks: a review of the state-of-the-art architectures

“…The DISCOVER and PRISM architectures were compared to conventional H.264/AVC codec in (Tonoli et al 2009 ), under a transmission scenario over a network with and without channel errors. The DISCOVER codec has been configured with GOP size 2 under the assumption that lost packets will be requested through the feedback channel, which avoids a deterioration of the frames’ reconstruction quality with potential cost of a higher bit rate requirement.…”

Practical distributed video coding in packet lossy channels

“…A more comprehensive study of the error resilience characteristics of two of the main DVC architectures, namely the Stanford architecture (DISCOVER) 9 and PRISM architecture, 10 has been presented in Ref. 23. Their results have shown better error resilience of both DISCOVER and PRISM with respect to H.264/AVC (i.e., 4 dB PSNR loss for DISCOVER and 9 dB loss for H.264/AVC at 300 kbps), besides indicating that DISCOVER outperforms PRISM in RD terms.…”

Wyner-Ziv based error correction of non-key frames for low complexity streaming applications

“…The system optimizes the bandwidth utilisation by transmitting only the selected parity bits. Thereby, it avoids the requirement of the feedback channel present in the original DVC architecture [12]. Also, the amount of parity bits been transmitted is varied depending on the percentage of bandwidth allocated for the WZ streams.…”

“…Because of the above feature, it could be employed in low-power transmission applications such as remote video data collecting systems and video surveillance applications [11]. Another feature of DVC is its ability to withstand transmission errors [12]. Hence, some of the emerging redundant coding proposals employ the WZ theory of DVC to enhance their error resilient performance.…”