Intra-distance Derived Weighted distortion for error resilience

Intra coding is one of the most effective ways of reducing the impact of error propagation caused by predictive coding. However, intra coding requires a higher bitrate when compared to inter coding. In order to use Inter coding and reduce error propagation it is important that inter macroblocks predict from ¿safe¿ areas that have a decreased chance of spreading errors. To this end we propose a low complexity method of biasing the prediction mechanism towards recently intra updated macroblocks. We devise a method of adjusting the distortion used in rate distortion optimization to take into account the temporal distance of the last Intra macroblock. Our simulations show that our intra-distance derived weighting (IDW) method improves video coding performance in a lossy environment by up to 1.4 dB for a modest increase in bitrate.