Temporal Adaptive Quantization using accurate estimations of Inter and Skip probabilities

International audienceHybrid video coding systems use spatial and temporal predictions in order to remove redundancies within the video source signal. These predictions create coding-scheme-related dependencies, often neglected for sake of simplicity. The R-D Spatio-Temporal Adaptive Quantization (RDSTQ) solution uses such dependencies to achieve better coding efficiency. It models the temporal distortion propagation by estimating the probability of a Coding Unit (CU) to be Inter coded. Based on this probability, each CU is given a weight depending on its relative importance compared to other CUs. However, the initial approach roughly estimates the Inter probability and does not take into account the Skip mode characteristics in the propagation. It induces important Target Bitrate Deviation (TBD) compared to the reference target rate. This paper provides undeniable improvements of the original RDSTQ model in using a more accurate estimation of the Inter probability. Then a new analytical solution for local quantizers is obtained by introducing the Skip probability of a CU into the temporal distortion propagation model. The proposed solution brings −2.05% BD-BR gain in average over the RDSTQ at low rate, which corresponds to −13.54% BD-BR gain in average against no local quantization. Moreover, the TBD is reduced from 38% to 14%