a b s t r a c tDistributed Video Coding (DVC) is a new video coding paradigm based on two major Information Theory results: the Slepian-Wolf and Wyner-Ziv theorems. Recently, practical DVC solutions have been proposed with promising results; however, there is still a need to study in a more systematic way the set of application scenarios for which DVC may bring major advantages. This paper intends to contribute for the identification of the most DVC friendly application scenarios, highlighting the expected benefits and drawbacks for each studied scenario. This selection is based on a proposed methodology which involves the characterization and clustering of the applications according to their most relevant characteristics, and their matching with the main potential DVC benefits.

In video coding standards like H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC, the encoder performs motion estimation in order to utilise temporal dependencies within a sequence. In addition to the rate of the residue, the encoder has to allocate bits for motion vectors required to compensate the motion at the decoder. This bit rate increases for smaller block sizes, since more motion vectors need to be transmitted. Therefore, motion compensation using dense motion vector field is not feasible for such an architecture.This paper proposes to estimate motion for coding of B frames at the decoder. Using this decoder-side motion estimation, the transmission of the motion vectors is not necessary and the bit rate is reduced. Furthermore, prediction quality is higher in many cases resulting in a coding gain of up to 1.7 dB at low bit rates and 0.2 dB at higher bit rates.

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