A hierarchical motion smoothing for distributed scalable video coding

This paper proposes a method to improve the coding efficiency of the distributed video coding based on a scalable encoder/decoder without feedback link. The proposed method performs a hierarchical motion smoothing to enable accurate rate control. Specifically, reflecting motion information on a coding rate, the encoder can estimate code amount which satisfies the decoder´s need. In addition, side information generation based on the hierarchical motion smoothing is proposed for further quality improvement. Experimental results show that the proposed method increases the PSNR-Y by 1.2 dB at 500 kbps in comparison with a block matching based method. Moreover the number of repeat operations to calculate cost value for side information generation can be reduced by 10 times from the conventional method, which demonstrates the practicability of the proposed method.