Efficient conditional entropy estimation for distributed video coding

Distributed video coding (DVC) is a compression method that aims to produce low complexity encoding. One of the main practical problems facing DVC is that the encoder must know the required rate. Theoretically, the rate is lower bounded by the conditional entropy of the source given the side information. In practice, there are losses that must also be taken into account in estimating the rate. However, an accurate rate estimate starts with an accurate estimate of the conditional entropy. In this paper we propose a computationally efficient method for accurately estimating the conditional entropy.