Low delay Wyner-Ziv coding using optical flow

Distributed Video Coding (DVC) is a video coding paradigm that exploits the source statistics at the decoder based on the availability of the Side Information (SI). The SI can be seen as a noisy version of the source, and the lower the noise the higher the RD performance of the decoder. The SI is usually generated by means of interpolation-based methods, which rely on the availability of a preceding and a following frame with respect to the to-be-decoded one. These methods lead to relatively high RD performance but also high delays. This work is focused on a low-delay DVC codec, relying only on preceding frames for the generation of the SI by means of Optical Flow (OF), which is also used in the refinement step of the SI for enhanced RD performance. Compared with a state-of-the-art extrapolation-based decoder the proposed solution achieves RD BjØntegaard gains up to 1.3 dB.