A state-free causal video encoding paradigm

A commonly encountered problem in the communication of predictively encoded video is that of predictive mismatch or drift. The problem of predictive mismatch manifests itself in numerous communication scenarios, including on-demand streaming, real-time streaming and multicast streaming. This paper proposes a state-free video encoding architecture that alleviates this problem. The main benefit of state-free encoding is that there is no need for the encoder and the decoder to maintain the same state, or equivalently, predict using the same predictor. This facilitates robust communication of causally encoded media. The proposed approach is based on the Wyner-Ziv theorem in Information Theory. Consequently, it leverages the superior performance of coset codes for the Wyner-Ziv problem for predictive coding. A video codec, with state-free functionality, based on the H.26L encoding standard is proposed. The performance of the proposed codec is within 1-2.5 dB of the H.26L encoder.