Encoder rate control for pixel-domain distributed video coding without feedback channel

Abstract

Distributed video coding (DVC) is a new video coding technique which has low encoder complexity and good error resilience. Rate control is one of the most important problems in DVC. In order to allocate an optimal number of parity bits for the current frame, most distributed video coders use a feedback channel (FC) to perform rate control at the decoder. However, using feedback channel can increase the decoding complexity and result in transmission delay. To solve these problems, we propose a novel encoder rate control (ERC) algorithm for pixel-domain distributed video (PDDV) coder without feedback channel at the cost of slightly increased encoder complexity. The experiment results show that the performance obtained using our ERC algorithm is comparable to that obtained using the decoder rate control (DRC)algorithm.