Fusion of global and local motion estimation using foreground objects for distributed video coding

The side information (SI) in Distributed Video Coding (DVC) is estimated using the available decoded frames and exploited for the decoding and reconstruction of other frames. The quality of the SI has a strong impact on the performance of DVC. Here, we propose a new approach that combines both global and local SI to improve coding performance. Since the background pixels in a frame are assigned to global estimation and the foreground objects to local estimation, one needs to estimate foreground objects in the SI using the backward and forward foreground objects, the background pixels are directly taken from the global SI. Specifically, elastic curves and local motion compensation are used to generate the foreground objects masks in the SI. Experimental results show that, as far as the rate-distortion performance is concerned, the proposed approach can achieve a PSNR improvement of up to 1.39 dB for a group of picture (GOP) size of 2, and up to 4.73 dB for larger GOP sizes, with respect to the reference DISCOVER codec.