Wireless Video Sensor Networks: Advances in Distributed Video Coding

Wireless Video Sensors Networks (WVSNs) generally suffer from the constraint that their sensor nodes must consume very little power. In this rapidly emerging video application, the traditional video coding architecture cannot be used due to its high encoding complexity. Thankfully, some theorems from Information Theory suggest that this problem can be solved by shifting the encoder tasks, partially or totally, to the decoder. These theorems are employed in the design of so-called Distributed Video Coding (DVC) solutions, the subject matter of this chapter. The chapter not only introduces the DVC but also reviews some important developments of the popular Stanford Wyner-Ziv coding architecture and caps it with latest research trends highlighting a Region-Based-Wyner-Ziv video codec that enables low-complexity encoding while achieving high compression efficiency.