Correlation modeling with decoder-side quantization distortion estimation for distributed video coding

Aiming for low-complexity encoding, distributed video coders still fail to achieve the performance of current industrial standards for video coding. One of most important problems in this area is the accurate modeling of the correlation between the predicted signal and the original video. In our previous work we showed that exploiting the quantization distortion can significantly improve the accuracy of a correlation estimator. In this paper we describe how the quantization distortion can be exploited purely at the decoder side without any performance penalty when compared to an encoder-aided system. As a result, the proposed correlation estimator delivers state-of-the-art modeling accuracy while neatly fitting the low-encoder-complexity characteristic of distributed video coding.