Distributed Video Coding for Video Communication on Mobile Devices and Sensors

In the context of digital video coding, recent insights have led to a new video coding paradigm called Distributed Video Coding, or DVC, characterized by low-complexity encoding and highcomplexity decoding, which is in contrast to traditional video coding schemes. This chapter provides a detailed overview of DVC by explaining the underlying principles and results from information theory and introduces a number of application scenarios. It also discusses the most important practical architectures that are currently available. One of these architectures is analyzed step-by-step to provide further details of the functional building blocks, including an analysis of the coding performance compared to traditional coding schemes. Next to this, it is demonstrated that the computational complexity in a video coding scheme can be shifted dynamically from the encoder to the decoder and vice versa by combining conventional and distributed video coding techniques. Lastly, this chapter discusses some currently important research topics of which it is expected that they can further enhance the performance of DVC, i.e., side information generation, virtual channel noise estimation, and new coding modes.