Visual Media Coding and Transmission

4.1 Introduction

Multimedia services have penetrated deeply into human lifestyle over the past decade. They come in diverse forms: business support, public security, entertainment, welfare, and many more. Video streaming, videoconferencing, content delivery, and other video related services form an indispensable, integral part of the increasingly popular service domains. The demand for higher video quality delivered at a low cost has been the driving force behind the vast amount of research activity carried out worldwide in innovating and improving the underlying technologies behind video services. In an era when the conventional video coding technologies are comfortably established, with H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, MPEG-2, MPEG-4-Visual, and so on having marked their places as recent developments, distributed video coding (DVC) has managed to introduce a radical shift in approach in the video coding arena, with a more flexible architecture utilizing distributed source coding techniques. DVC proposes a significantly lower complexity for the video encoder, while the major computationally-expensive tasks, including motion estimation for exploiting source redundancies, are shifted to the decoder. This low-complexity feature could be very effectively utilized for the design of very-low-cost video cameras for a range of applications.

Some of the prospective applications of DVC include wireless sensor networks used for security surveillance systems, and mobile video communications, which have ...