Improving predictive video coding performance with decoder side information

Although major achievements have been reached in terms of video compression efficiency, additional gains are still needed to satisfy current and emerging applications needs. This trend justifies the continuous efforts to go beyond the compression capabilities of the state-of-the-art H.264/AVC standard. This paper proposes to further bridge two video coding approaches, the popular predictive and the emerging distributed coding paradigms, by proposing a novel bidirectional (B) coding process to be integrated in the H.264/AVC codec, inspired by the side information creation module, central in distributed video coding. The novel B-slice coding process builds on a new reference frame, the side information frame, which is both created at the encoder and decoder, as the SI creation method does not need the original to be available. The experimental results for the novel coding solution show average bitrate savings of 5.89% both for the low and high bitrate regions.