Statistical reconstruction for predictive video coding

Substantial rate-distortion (RD) gains have been achieved in video coding standards by increasing the encoder complexity while maintaining the decoder complexity the lowest possible. On the other hand, the alternative distributed video coding (DVC) approach proposes to exploit the video redundancy mostly at the decoder side, keeping the encoder as simple as possible. One of the most characteristic DVC tools is the statistical reconstruction of the DCT coefficients, which plays a similar role to the inverse scalar quantization (ISQ) in predictive codecs. The main objective of this paper is to propose a statistical reconstruction approach for predictive coding (notably the H.264/AVC standard) as a substitute to ISQ, thus creating a coding architecture with a mix of predictive and distributed coding tools. Experimental results show that the proposed statistical reconstruction solution allows achieving Bjontegaard bitrate savings up to 2.4% regarding the ISQ based H.264/AVC High profile codec.