Stopping criterions for turbo coding in a Wyner-Ziv video codec

Distributed video coding (DVC) targets video coding applications with low encoding complexity by generating a prediction of the video signal at the decoder. One of the most common architectures uses turbo codes to correct errors in this prediction. Unfortunately, a rigorous analysis of turbo coding in the context of DVC is missing. We have targeted one particular aspect of turbo coding: the stopping criterion. The stopping criterion indicates whether decoding was successful, i.e., whether the errors in the prediction signal have been corrected. In this paper we describe and compare several stopping criterions known from the field of channel coding and criterions currently used in DVC. As our results suggest the choice of the stopping criterion has a significant impact on the overall video-coding performance. Moreover, we have found that there are even better performing criterions than those currently used in DVC.