An efficient side information generation using seed blocks for distributed video coding

Recently, a new video coding technique, distributed video coding (DVC), is an emerging research area for low power video coding applications. In the DVC, the encoder is much simpler than the conventional video codec, whereas the decoder is very heavy. The DVC decoder exploits side information which is generated by motion compensated frame interpolation to reconstruct the Wyner-Ziv frame. This paper proposes an efficient side information generation algorithm using seed blocks for DVC. Seed blocks are firstly selected to be used for motion estimation of the other blocks. As the side information is close to the target image, the final reconstructed image in the DVC decoder has better quality and the compression ratio becomes high. The proposed method contributes to improve the DVC compression performance with reduced computing time. Experimental results show that accurate motion vectors are estimated by the proposed method and its computational complexity of motion estimation is significantly reduced in comparison with the previous methods.