Reducing decoding complexity by improving motion field using bicubic and lanczos interpolation techniques in Wyner-Ziv video coding

Abstract

This paper describes interpolation method of motion field in the Wyner-Ziv video coding (WZVC) based on Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. In the EM algorithm, the estimated motion field distribution is calculated on a block-by-block basis. Each pixel in the block shares similar probability distribution, producing an undesired blocking artefact on the pixel-based motion field. The proposed interpolation techniques are Bicubic and Lanczos which successively use 16 and 32 neighborhood probability distributions of block-based motion field for one pixel in k-by-k block on pixel-based motion field. EM-based WZVC codec updates the estimated probability distribution on block-based motion field, and interpolates it to pixel resolution. This is required to generate higher-quality soft side information (SI) such that the decoding algorithm is able to make syndrome estimation more quickly. Our experiments showed that the proposed interpolation methods have the capability to reduce EM-based WZVC decoding complexity with small increment of bit rate.