Distortion estimates for adaptive temporal decompositions of video under displacement errors and quantization noise

In video communication systems, due to quantization and transmission errors, mismatches between the transmitter- and receiver-side information may occur, severely impacting the reconstructed video. Theoretical understanding of the quality degradation ensuing from such mismatches is essential when targeting quality-of-service for video communications. In this paper, by viewing the mismatches in the transform coefficients and the adaptive parameters of the temporal analysis of a video coding system as perturbations in the synthesis system, we derive analytic approximations for the expected reconstruction distortion. Our theoretical results are experimentally assessed using adaptive temporal decompositions within a video coding system based on motion-adaptive temporal lifting decomposition. Since we focus on the generic case of adaptive lifting transforms, our results can provide useful insights for estimation-theoretic resiliency mechanisms to be considered within standardized transform-based codecs.