A novel source-channel constant distortion model and its application in error resilient frame-level bit allocation

Abstract

Compared with either heuristic or RD optimization based approaches, frame-level bit allocation strategies based on constant quality models are inadequately studied, which, however, are inherently more capable on achieving consistent video quality over the whole sequence for real-time single-pass rate control tasks. Moreover, no any existent models is error-resilient. In this paper, we propose a novel error resilient source-channel constant distortion (SCCD) model, whose uniquely selected frame complexity measure effectively accomodates the joint impact from both the non-stationary source video signal and the lossy channel. Compared with its existent counterparts, our model has a higher modelling accuracy, and can be generally applied in frame-level bit allocation to enhance error robustness of rate control. As an example, an error resilient frame-level bit allocation solution is proposed based on the model. Simulation results demonstrate that: for lossy video transmission, the proposed method can achieve more consistent and higher overall visual qualities than that of the other non-error-resilient schemes, which proves the remarkable potentials of the new model.