Distributed coding of endoscopic video

Triggered by the challenging prerequisites of wireless capsule endoscopic video technology, this paper presents a novel distributed video coding (DVC) scheme, which employs an original hash-based side-information creation method at the decoder. In contrast to existing DVC schemes, the proposed codec generates high quality side-information at the decoder, even under the strenuous motion conditions encountered in endoscopic video. Performance evaluation using broad endoscopic video material shows that the proposed approach brings notable and consistent compression gains over various state-of-the-art video codecs at the additional benefit of vastly reduced encoding complexity

Neural Distributed Compressor Discovers Binning

We consider lossy compression of an information source when the decoder has lossless access to a correlated one. This setup, also known as the Wyner-Ziv problem, is a special case of distributed source coding. To this day, practical approaches for the Wyner-Ziv problem have neither been fully developed nor heavily investigated. We propose a data-driven method based on machine learning that leverages the universal function approximation capability of artificial neural networks. We find that our neural network-based compression scheme, based on variational vector quantization, recovers some principles of the optimum theoretical solution of the Wyner-Ziv setup, such as binning in the source space as well as optimal combination of the quantization index and side information, for exemplary sources. These behaviors emerge although no structure exploiting knowledge of the source distributions was imposed. Binning is a widely used tool in information theoretic proofs and methods, and to our knowledge, this is the first time it has been explicitly observed to emerge from data-driven learning.Comment: draft of a journal version of our previous ISIT 2023 paper (available at: arXiv:2305.04380). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2305.0438

Wyner-Ziv coding based on TCQ and LDPC codes and extensions to multiterminal source coding

Driven by a host of emerging applications (e.g., sensor networks and wireless video), distributed source coding (i.e., Slepian-Wolf coding, Wyner-Ziv coding and various other forms of multiterminal source coding), has recently become a very active research area. In this thesis, we first design a practical coding scheme for the quadratic Gaussian Wyner-Ziv problem, because in this special case, no rate loss is suffered due to the unavailability of the side information at the encoder. In order to approach the Wyner-Ziv distortion limit D??W Z(R), the trellis coded quantization (TCQ) technique is employed to quantize the source X, and irregular LDPC code is used to implement Slepian-Wolf coding of the quantized source input Q(X) given the side information Y at the decoder. An optimal non-linear estimator is devised at the joint decoder to compute the conditional mean of the source X given the dequantized version of Q(X) and the side information Y . Assuming ideal Slepian-Wolf coding, our scheme performs only 0.2 dB away from the Wyner-Ziv limit D??W Z(R) at high rate, which mirrors the performance of entropy-coded TCQ in classic source coding. Practical designs perform 0.83 dB away from D??W Z(R) at medium rates. With 2-D trellis-coded vector quantization, the performance gap to D??W Z(R) is only 0.66 dB at 1.0 b/s and 0.47 dB at 3.3 b/s. We then extend the proposed Wyner-Ziv coding scheme to the quadratic Gaussian multiterminal source coding problem with two encoders. Both direct and indirect settings of multiterminal source coding are considered. An asymmetric code design containing one classical source coding component and one Wyner-Ziv coding component is first introduced and shown to be able to approach the corner points on the theoretically achievable limits in both settings. To approach any point on the theoretically achievable limits, a second approach based on source splitting is then described. One classical source coding component, two Wyner-Ziv coding components, and a linear estimator are employed in this design. Proofs are provided to show the achievability of any point on the theoretical limits in both settings by assuming that both the source coding and the Wyner-Ziv coding components are optimal. The performance of practical schemes is only 0.15 b/s away from the theoretical limits for the asymmetric approach, and up to 0.30 b/s away from the limits for the source splitting approach

Layered Wyner-Ziv video coding for noisy channels

The growing popularity of video sensor networks and video celluar phones has generated the need for low-complexity and power-efficient multimedia systems that can handle multiple video input and output streams. While standard video coding techniques fail to satisfy these requirements, distributed source coding is a promising technique for ??uplink?? applications. Wyner-Ziv coding refers to lossy source coding with side information at the decoder. Based on recent theoretical result on successive Wyner-Ziv coding, we propose in this thesis a practical layered Wyner-Ziv video codec using the DCT, nested scalar quantizer, and irregular LDPC code based Slepian-Wolf coding (or lossless source coding with side information) for noiseless channel. The DCT is applied as an approximation to the conditional KLT, which makes the components of the transformed block conditionally independent given the side information. NSQ is a binning scheme that facilitates layered bit-plane coding of the bin indices while reducing the bit rate. LDPC code based Slepian-Wolf coding exploits the correlation between the quantized version of the source and the side information to achieve further compression. Different from previous works, an attractive feature of our proposed system is that video encoding is done only once but decoding allowed at many lower bit rates without quality loss. For Wyner-Ziv coding over discrete noisy channels, we present a Wyner-Ziv video codec using IRA codes for Slepian-Wolf coding based on the idea of two equivalent channels. For video streaming applications where the channel is packet based, we apply unequal error protection scheme to the embedded Wyner-Ziv coded video stream to find the optimal source-channel coding trade-off for a target transmission rate over packet erasure channel