Witsenhausen-Wyner video coding

Inspired by Witsenhausen and Wyner´s 1980 (now expired) patent on “interframe coder for video signals”, this paper presents a Witsenhausen-Wyner video codec, where the previously decoded video frame is used at the decoder as side information for joint decoding. Specifically, we replace the predictive Inter coding in H.264/AVC by the syndrome-based coding scheme of Wistenhausen and Wyner, while keeping the Intra and Skip modes unchanged. Within Wistenhausen-Wyner coding mode, we optimize the decisions between syndrome coding and entropy coding among different DCT bands and among different bit-planes within each DCT coefficient. We employ forward motion estimation at the encoder and send the motion vectors to help generate the side information at the decoder, since our focus is not on low-complexity encoding. We also examine the tradeoff between the motion vector resolution and coding performance. Extensive simulations of video transmission over wireless networks show that Witsenhausen-Wyner video coding is much more robust against channel errors than H.264/AVC. The price paid for enhanced error-resilience with Witsenhausen-Wyner coding is a small loss in compression efficiency.