Study on the distribution of DCT residues and its application to R-D analysis of video coding

Quantization errors in discrete-cosine-transform (DCT) video compression are known as DCT residues. Knowledge on their distribution is essential in understanding rate-distortion (R-D) behaviors of generic video coding. Traditional R-D analysis adopted a simplified distortion model. Those distortion models took only quantization parameter into account. They lack adaptability to variation of video sources, as the distribution of coding errors also depends on the statistics of video source. Another common approach models the distribution of DCT residues by fitting experimental data from coded pictures to conjectured statistical distributions, but it did not provide insights into what gives rise to the distribution of DCT residues. This paper intends to quantify the distribution of DCT residues with respect to video source and with respect to the quantization strategy by understanding the quantization of DCT frequency components. Moreover, it is applied to derive an R-D model to show the advantage of the proposed distribution model.