Versatile multiview layered video based on distributed source coding
Video content constitutes today a large part of the data traffic on the Internet. This is allowed by the capillary spreading of video codec technologies: nowadays, every computer, tablet and smart phone is equipped with video encoding and decoding technologies. As a matter of fact, the video content often exists in different formats, that, even though they can be incompatible to each other, still have a significant mutual redundancy. The incompatibility prevents an efficient exploitation of the scalability, which on the other hand is a very important characteristic when it comes to efficient network use. An interesting alternative to classical scalable video is to use distributed video coding (DVC) for the enhancement layers. In the envisaged scenario, clients have different decoders for the base layer, adapted to the characteristics of their de-vice. However they can share the same enhancement layer, since DVC allows encoding frames independently from the reference that will be employed at the decoder. This approach has been considered in the past in order to improve temporal and spatial scalability. In this work we review the existing approaches, improve them using more recent DVC techniques and perform a new analysis for the emerging multi-view applications.