Dynamic GOP size control for low-delay distributed video coding

Distributed video coding (DVC) is a video coding paradigm that aims at shifting the complexity from the encoder to the decoder. Most encoding schemes in DVC use a GOP size of 2 or 3 which is fixed and doesn´t depend on the video characteristics. In this paper, we propose an architecture that has a unique and simple GOP size control module that results in greater rate-distortion (RD) performance. The proposed codec also has an efficient two-phase block classification scheme and a prioritized block classification scheme to further improve the efficiency. It also uses arithmetic coding instead of the iterative turbo or low density parity check accumulate (LD-PCA) codes used in most other DVC codecs, thus reducing system latency tremendously. Results show that the proposed codec outperforms a GOP size control algorithm from literature with a gain of almost 4dB at similar bitrates.