Motion estimation at the decoder using maximum likelihood techniques for distributed video coding

Distributed video coding techniques have been proposed to support relatively "light" video encoding systems, where some of the encoder complexity is transfered to the decoder. In some of these systems, motion estimation is performed at the decoder to improve compression performance: a block in a previous frame has to be found that provides the correct side information to decode information in the current frame. In this paper we compare various techniques for motion estimation at the decoder that have been proposed in the literature and we propose a novel technique that exploits all the information available at the decoder using a maximum likelihood formulation. Our experiments show that likelihood techniques provide potential performance advantages when used in combination with some existing methods, in particular as they do not require additional rate overhead.