Analyzing Symbol and Bit Plane-Based LDPC in Distributed Video Coding

Many distributed video coders are implemented using sophisticated error correction codes that use soft information (conditional probabilities) as a priori knowledge. This a priori information models the dependency behavior between the input data and side-information. In this paper we analyze both a symbol and bit plane-based approach using LDPC codes. We show both theoretically and experimentally that a bit plane-based encoder has the same performance as a symbol-based coder, if an appropriate dependency model is chosen. We argue that due to a significant complexity reduction a bit plane-based coder is preferable over a symbol-based approach.