Wyner-Ziv to H.264 video transcoder for mobile telephony

Wyner-Ziv (WZ) coding has been receiving attention from the research community as it offers a more symmetric complexity in video communication by reducing the complexity of video encoding. This encoding paradigm, however, increases the complexity of video decoding. This paper presents a novel video communication architecture that exploits the low complexity WZ encoding without being burdened by high complexity WZ decoding. At the core of the proposed architecture is a WZ to H.264 transcoder that converts WZ video to H.264 to reduce the amount of resources necessary for decoding. This architecture enables low complexity encoding and decoding on mobile devices. Using very simple WZ encoders and H.264 decoders, a communication system will only need very low complexity devices at both the sender and receiver sides. Such low complexity communication devices are highly desirable for practical consumer applications. The paper also presents the low complexity algorithms for WZ to H.264 transcoding. The time reduction of the improved WZ/H.264 transcoder offers a very acceptable 86% complexity reduction with negligible Rate-Distortion loss.