A novel distortion-quantization model and its application in low bitrate video communications

With the development of ISO-MPEG-4 and ITU-T H.26L video coding standards, and a growing interest in low computational complexity video solutions for mobile devices, there is a need for simple yet accurate statistical representations to model the rate-distortion characteristics of video data. In this paper we propose a new rate-distortion model, specifically, a new distortion-quantization model. Although more generally applicable, the model proposed in this paper is especially useful for low bitrate coding. We discuss the plausibility of the model using analytical means. We then examine coded video data from several sequences to evaluate the accuracy of the proposed model. The chi-squared test and the coefficient of determination are used for this purpose. Finally, we show the use of the model in real-time rate control for a very-low-bitrate video communication application.