A high speed pipeline structure of hardware implementation for block classification for distributed video coding

Distributed video coding (DVC) is a video coding paradigm that aims at shifting the complexity from the encoder to the decoder. Traditionally, the existing DVC codecs encode the video frames as either key frame or Wyner-Ziv (WZ) frame. In WZ frames, all blocks are encoded as WZ blocks. We observed that, in WZ frame, there exists few blocks having intense motions, while many blocks have scarce motions. To improve the higher Rate-Distortion performance, we need to classify the blocks in a WZ frame into three categories, namely key block, WZ block and skip block. And encode each category with different scheme. So, a high speed classifier is very important to improve the throughput of the codec. In this paper, we propose a high speed pipelined block classifier for distributed video codec, which is suitable to work in real time video processing.