End to end video distortion estimation with advanced error concealment considerations

Abstract

Video transmission over error prone channels can suffer from packet losses when channel conditions are not favourable. As a result the quality of the decoded video at the receiver often differs from that of the encoded video at the transmitter. Accurate estimation of the end to end distortion (the distortion due to compression and packet loss after decoder error concealment) at the encoder can lead to more efficient and effective application of error resilience (e.g. selective intra coding, redundant slices etc.). This paper presents an end to end distortion estimation model that incorporates a probabilistic estimation of the distortion introduced by advanced error concealment methods often used by decoders, and new decaying factors, to mitigate the effect of packets loss. The proposed model offers significant improvements in estimation accuracy relative to existing models that only consider previous frame copy as the concealment strategy of the decoder.