Multimedia services have pervaded human lifestyle during the past decade. They come in diverse forms: business support, public security, entertainment, welfare and many more. Video streaming, video conferencing, content delivery and other video related services form indispensable integral parts of these highly important service domains. The demand for higher video quality, delivered at a low cost, has been the driving force behind the vast amount of worldwide research activity, which aims to improve the underlying technologies for video services. Distributed Video Coding (DVC) has emerged from the video coding research community in the last few years, with some important features and innovations. DVC has managed to introduce a radical shift in approach in the video coding arena with a more flexible architecture utilizing distributed source coding techniques. DVC proposes significantly lower complexity for the video encoder while the major computationally expensive tasks, including motion estimation for exploiting source redundancies, is shifted to the decoder. This low complexity feature could be very effectively utilized for the design of very low cost video cameras for a range of applications.
Even though DVC has been the focus of some research in recent years, it remains a very immature technology for practical use. On the one hand, the existing architectures rely on several hypothetical functional blocks that demand a significant amount of further research effort to achieve practical solutions. On the other hand, the compression efficiency of the current best DVC algorithms still lags behind the state-of-the-art in video coding, H.264/AVC in particular. The purpose of this special issue is to bring forward recent developments on distributed video coding for low cost video coding.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

- Motion interpolation
- Intelligent reconstruction
- Side information refinement
- Alternative channel coding techniques for DVC
- Unidirectional DVC
- Error resilience in DVC
- DVC with larger GOP sizes
- Quantisation techniques
- Distributed coding for other applications

Paper Format and Submission

Papers must be typed in a font size no smaller than 10 pt, and presented in single-column format with double line spacing on one side A4 paper. All pages should be numbered. The manuscript should be formatted according to the IET Proceedings requirements, typically 4000-6000 words long with 6-10 Figures. Detailed information about IET Research Journals, including an author guide and formatting information is available at:
http://www.theiet.org/publications/journals/

All papers must be submitted through the journal's Manuscript Central system: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/iet-ipr
When uploading your paper, please ensure that your manuscript is marked as being for this special issue.

Editor-in-Chief: Farzin Deravi, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK

Guest Editors:-

Prof. Ahmet Kondoz, University of Surrey, UK
Dr. Anil Fernando, University of Surrey, UK email: W.Fernando@surrey.ac.uk
Prof. Fernando Pereira, Instituto Superior Técnico - Instituto de Telecomunicações, Portugal
Prof. Stefano Tubaro, Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission: 30 October 2008
First Acceptance: 1 March 2009
Amended versions: 1 May 2009
Publication: September 2009 issue