A novel source-channel constant distortion model and its application in error resilient frame-level bit allocation

Compared with either heuristic or RD optimization based approaches, frame-level bit allocation strategies based on constant quality models are inadequately studied. They are, however, inherently more capable of achieving consistent video quality over the whole sequence for real-time single-pass rate control tasks. Moreover, no existing model is error-resilient. In this paper, we propose a novel error resilient source-channel constant distortion (SCCD) model, whose uniquely selected frame complexity measure effectively accomodates the joint impact from both the nonstationary source video signal and the lossy channel. Compared with its existent counterparts, our model has a higher modelling accuracy, and can be generally applied in frame-level bit allocation to enhance error robustness of rate control. As an example, an error resilient frame-level bit allocation solution is proposed based on the model. Simulation results demonstrate that for lossy video transmission, the proposed method can achieve more consistent and higher overall visual qualities than that of the other nonerror-resilient schemes, which proves the remarkable potential of the new model.