Symmetric Distributed Coding of Stereo Video Sequences

In this paper we present a novel video coding scheme to compress stereo video sequences. We consider a wireless sensor network scenario, where the sensing nodes cannot communicate with each other and are characterized by limited computational complexity. The joint decoder exploits both the temporal and inter-view correlation to generate the side information. To this end, we propose a fusion algorithm that adaptively selects either the temporal or the inter-view side information on a pixel-by-pixel basis. In addition, the coding algorithm is symmetric with respect to the two cameras. We also propose a practical stopping criterion for turbo decoding that determines when decoding is successful. Experimental results on stereo video sequences show that a coding efficiency gain up to 4dB can be obtained by the proposed scheme at high bit-rates.