Improved Side Information Generation Using Field Coding for Wyner-Ziv Codec

Wyner-Ziv video coding is a new video compression paradigm based on distributed source coding theory of Slepian-Wolf and Wyner-Ziv. Wyner-Ziv coding enables light-encoder/heavy-decoder structure by shifting complex modules including motion estimation and compensation task to the decoder. Instead of performing the complicated motion estimation process in the encoder, the Wyner-Ziv decoder performs the motion estimation for the generation of side information in order to make the predicted signal of the Wyner-Ziv frame. The efficiency of side information generation deeply affects the overall coding performance, since the bit-rates of the Wyner-Ziv coding is directly dependent on side information. In this paper, an improved side information generation method using field coding is proposed. In the proposed method, top fields are coded with the existing SI generation method and bottom fields are coded with new SI generation method using the information of the top fields. Simulation results show that the proposed method improves the quality of the side information and rate-distortion performance compared to the conventional method.