A novel visual distortion sensitivity analysis for video encoder bit allocation

A novel video bit allocation technique adopting a visual distortion sensitivity model for better rate-visual distortion coding control is proposed in this paper. Instead of applying complicated semantic understanding, the proposed automatic distortion sensitivity analysis process analyzes both the motion and the texture structures in the video sequences in order to achieve better bit allocation for rate-constrained video coding. This analysis evaluates the tolerable perceptual distortions on a macroblock basis, and allocates fewer bits to regions permitting large perceptual distortions for rate reduction. The proposed algorithm can be incorporated into any existing video coding rate control schemes to achieve same visual quality at greatly reduced bitrate. Experiments based on H.264 show that this technique achieves bit-rate saving of up to 40% with no perceptual quality degradations. The experiments also demonstrate the inadequacy of using PSNR as a distortion measure in a video coding framework.