A Novel Analytic Quantization-Distortion Model for Hybrid Video Coding

A proper theoretical quantization-distortion model for hybrid video coding is always desirable, since this allows us to explain the behavior of existing codecs and to design better ones. However, due to the existence of motion-compensated prediction, hybrid video coding introduces interframe dependency into the encoded video, which makes its quantization-distortion characteristics difficult to analyze. In this paper, a joint analysis of quantization and motion-compensated prediction is presented. For a complete analysis, we investigate not only the distortion that quantization introduces into video signal, but also its effect on motion-compensated prediction. Based on the joint analysis, a quantization-distortion model of hybrid video coding is proposed. Our extensive experimental results show that the proposed model can estimate the quantization-distortion curve of hybrid video coding with high accuracy. Furthermore, the estimation accuracy remains high for various video sequences and encoder configurations.