Source Distortion Temporal Propagation Model for Motion Compensated Video Coding Optimization

Rate-distortion optimization (RDO) is widely employed to maximize coding efficiency in hybrid video coding. Due to an extensive use of spatial-temporal predictions in video coding, a global RDO problem becomes so complex that the processing of each coding unit (e.g. a macro block) is dependent and entangled each other. Usually the RDO is simply performed for each coding unit individually and independently, thus compromising the RDO performance significantly. In this paper, we examine temporal dependent RDO by developing a novel source distortion temporal propagation (SDTP) model, which takes into account the influence of a current coding macro block to future macro blocks in its temporal propagation chain. Accordingly estimations of the influence and the corresponding Lagrange multiplier for the proposed SDTP-based RDO are obtained. Experimental results show consistently a significant coding gain of the proposed scheme over H.264/AVC.