Towards Practical Distributed Video Coding for Energy-Constrained Networks

Most of current distributed video codecs are developed based on the structure of Stanford scheme that employs channel coding like LDPC and Turbo codes. However, they need many times of iteration and feedback, which bring high decoding complexity and latency that make them less practical in energy-constrained networks. In this paper, a new distributed video codec based on modulo operation in the pixel domain is proposed, which only needs one feedback request and has a much lower decoding complexity. Mathematical proof of the equivalence between modulo operation and coset partition in the M-ary field is given, which means that the modulo operation in the M-ary field is a good substitute for channel codes in the distributed video coding systems. A system is built based on the proposed scheme. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art distributed video codecs with the decoding complexity as low as 1% to 10% of them.