Multi-hypothesis Distributed Stereo Video Coding

Distributed Video Coding (DVC) is a video coding paradigm that exploits the source statistics at the decoder based on the availability of the Side Information (SI). Stereo sequences are constituted by two views to give the user an illusion of depth. In this paper, we present a DVC decoder for stereo sequences, exploiting an interpolated intra-view SI and two inter-view SIs. The quality of the SI has a major impact on the DVC Rate-Distortion (RD) performance. As the inter-view SIs individually present lower RD performance compared with the intra-view SI, we propose multi-hypothesis decoding for robust fusion and improved performance. Compared with a state-of-the-art single side information solution, the proposed DVC decoder improves the RD performance for all the chosen test sequences by up to 0.8 dB. The proposed multi-hypothesis decoder showed higher robustness compared with other fusion techniques.