Side information refinement for long duration GOPs in DVC

Side information generation is a critical step in distributed video coding systems. This is performed by using motion compensated temporal interpolation between two or more key frames (KFs). However, when the temporal distance between key frames increases (i.e. when the GOP size becomes large), the linear interpolation becomes less effective. In a previous work we showed that this problem can be mitigated by using high order interpolation. Now, in the case of long duration GOP, state-of-the-art algorithms propose a hierarchical algorithm for side information generation. By using this procedure, the quality of the central interpolated image in a GOP is consistently worse than images closer to the KFs. In this paper we propose a refinement of the central WZFs by higher order interpolation of the already decoded WZFs, that are closer to the WZF to be estimated. So we reduce the fluctuation of side information quality, with a beneficial impact on final rate-distortion characteristics of the system. The experimental results show an improvement on the SI up to 2.71 dB with respect the state-of-the-art and a global improvement of the PSNR on the decoded frames up to 0.71 dB and a bit rate reduction up to 15%.