Hybrid End-to-End Distortion Estimation and its Application in Error Resilient Video Coding

This paper addresses the low complexity end-to-end distortion (ED) estimation problem for error resilient video coding. Unlike the existing "look-back-only" ED estimation paradigm, we propose a new hybrid paradigm involving both "look-back" and "look-ahead" estimation. For low complexity, our "look-back" estimation accurately accounts for the error propagation (EP) distortion from the last two frames only, while the impacts of "look-back" ignored frame losses are compensated by "look-ahead" frame-level EP approximation. The proposed hybrid scheme is then applied in ED-based RD optimization (ED-RDO) of both motion estimation (ME) and coding mode selection (MS). Results show that our hybrid estimation scheme yields accurate ED estimates, and when applied in ED-RDO ME and MS, significant performance gain is achieved over the other existing low complexity solutions.