A probabilistic intra mode decision in distributed video coding

Intra mode is a useful coding tool in Distributed Video Coding (DVC) for video sequences having fast motion content. A major limitation associated with the existing intra mode decision, however, is that its efficiency highly depends on user-specified thresholds or modeling parameters. This paper proposes a probabilistic method to address this problem. The probabilities of intra and Wyner-Ziv (WZ) modes are determined firstly by examining correlation of pixels in spatial and temporal directions. Then a comparison between the WZ probability and intra probability decides a coding mode between intra coding and WZ coding without relying on any user-specified thresholds or modeling parameters. Experimental results show its superior rate-distortion performance of improvements up to 2 dB against a conventional Wyner-Ziv coding without intra mode decision.