Modeling of Loss-Distortion in Hierarchical Prediction Codecs

Existing video distortion models used for hybrid video codecs do not match the hierarchical prediction structure employed in SVC. In this paper, we derive a new video distortion model that captures the sensitivity to frame losses of a hierarchical prediction video decoder using the picture copy (PC) concealment strategy of SVC. Existing frameworks only cover non-scalable coders, and therefore, fall short of accurately modeling scalable coders due to the additional parameters that come into play. Performance evaluations show that our model closely approximates the loss-distortion of hierarchical coders for video sequences with different levels of motion, with exceptional performance in sequences with homogeneous levels of motion