New rate-distortion modeling and efficient rate control for H.264/AVC video coding

  • Authors:

  • Yimin Zhou;Yu Sun;Zhidan Feng;Shixin Sun

  • Affiliations:

  • College of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Electronic Science & Technology of China, Chengdu, China and Department of Computer Science, University of Central Arkansas, AR, USA;Department of Computer Science, University of Central Arkansas, AR, USA;Acxiom Corporation, Conway, AR, USA;College of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Electronic Science & Technology of China, Chengdu, China

  • Venue:
  • Image Communication
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Rate control (RC) is crucial in controlling compression bit rates and qualities for networked video applications. In this paper, we propose a new rate-distortion (R-D) model and an efficient rate control scheme for H.264/AVC video coding, which elegantly resolve the inter-dependency problem between rate-distortion optimization and rate control by eliminating the need of coding complexity prediction for an inter-frame. The objective is to achieve accurate bit rate, obtain optimal video quality while reducing quality variations and simultaneously handling buffer fullness effectively. The proposed algorithm encapsulates a number of new features, including a coding complexity measure for intra-frames, a rate-distortion model, an accurate quantization parameter (QP) estimation for intra-frames, an incremental quantization parameter calculation method for inter-frames, a proportional+integral+derivative (PID) buffer controller, and an intelligent bit-allocation-balancing technique. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the JVT-G012 solution by providing accurate rate regulation, effectively reducing frame skipping, and finally improving coding quality by up to 1.80dB.