A Wyner-Ziv coding approach to transmission of interactive video over wireless channels

In this paper we address the problem of transferring interactive video over wireless channels. We propose a distributed video coding solution based on Wyner-Ziv coding. To adapt to the highly time-varying wireless channels, the transmission of interactive video based on Wyner-Ziv coding is applied in a proactive way: only the current frame coded by Wyner-Ziv techniques is sent when the channel condition is poor; "future frames" are sent when there is redundant capacity in the channel. A multi-view camera array is adopted. A frontal looking camera is regarded as the master camera and others are auxiliary ones. Wyner-Ziv coding is implemented to compress video from the master camera while motion-JPEG types of codecs are used to compress auxiliary views. Depending on head motions, at least one of the side views acts as "future frame" for the current frame from the master camera. The "future frames" are then used to generate more faithful side-information for Wyner-Ziv frames. We built a three-camera array to test our idea. An average 2 dB gain is achieved in the experiments.