Operational rate-distortion modeling for wavelet video coders

Based on our statistical investigation of a typical three-dimensional (3-D) wavelet codec, we present a unified mathematical model to describe its operational rate-distortion (RD) behavior. The quantization distortion of the reconstructed video frames is assessed by tracking the quantization noise along the 3-D wavelet decomposition trees. The coding bit-rate is estimated for a class of embedded video coders. Experimental results show that the model captures sequence characteristics accurately and reveals the relationship between wavelet decomposition levels and the overall RD performance. After being trained with offline RD data, the model enables accurate prediction of real RD performance of video codecs and therefore can enable optimal RD adaptation of the encoding parameters according to various network conditions