Low-complexity distributed multiple description coding for wireless video sensor networks

Quality-of-service-guaranteed video communication in wireless video sensor networks (WVSNs) is extremely challenging because of the unique constraints of WVSN (e.g. limited resources of sensors and high error rates in wireless sensor networks) and the characteristics of video traffic (e.g. huge data rate and tight delay bounds). Distributed video coding (DVC) has emerged as a new video coding paradigm for video applications with resource-limited encoders. However, current DVC architectures still have several technical limitations that prevent their widespread use in real-world applications. A low-complexity distributed multiple description coding method that combines the principles of multiple description coding and DVC has been proposed to further improve the error resilience of DVC, while maintaining low encoder complexity and good rate-distortion performance in WVSN. Simulation results show that the proposed method is robust against transmission errors, while maintaining low encoder complexity and low system latency for resource-limited applications in WVSNs.