Distortion weighted motion compensated image coding

A surface distortion measure for a motion-compensated image-coding algorithm is described. The surface distortion measure (SDM) is a function of both the signal variance and the error variance. This functional relationship circumvents a major problem that is associated with using the ratio of these quantities as a quantizer design parameter. When the surface distortion measure is used as the fidelity criterion for the residual quantizer for the algorithm, superior data compression capabilities with little added distortion are achieved. A comparison of the results using both signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the SDM as a fidelity criterion in the coding procedure is presented.<>