Improving Frame Interpolation with Spatial Motion Smoothing for Pixel Domain Distributed Video Coding

Distributed video coding (DVC) is a new compression paradigm based on two key Information Theory results: the Slepian-Wolf and Wyner-Ziv theorems. A particular case of DVC deals with lossy source coding with side information at the decoder (Wyner-Ziv) and enables to shift the coding complexity from the encoder to the decoder. The solution here described is based on a very lightweight encoder leaving for the decoder the time consuming motion estimation/compensation task. In this paper, the performance of the pixel domain distributed video codec is improved by using better side information based derived by motion compensated frame interpolation algorithms at the decoder. Besides forward and bidirectional motion estimation, a spatial motion smoothing algorithm to eliminate motion outliers is proposed. This allows significant improvements in the rate-distortion (RD) performance without sacrificing the encoder complexity.