Rate control scheme for video coding using low-memory-cost look-up table

• Authors: Linjian Mo;Chun Chen;Jiajun Bu;Xu Li;Zhi Yang
• Venue: PSIVT'06 Proceedings of the First Pacific Rim conference on Advances in Image and Video Technology
• Year: 2006

This paper presents a new MPEG-4/H.263 rate control scheme. It is applicable to constant-bit-rate transmissions containing equal-interval I-frames. Conventional schemes usually allocate bits equally to each P-frame, resulting in large video quality variations. In this work, in order to smooth quality variations, we allocate bits unequally to each P-frame by its encoding complexity and buffer level. In macroblock (MB) layer, rate-distortion model is usually employed to determine MB QP, but it needs complex floating-point computations. So, instead, we design a simple and effective look-up table, which also relates MB QP, SAD and the texture bit counts. With certain improvements, our table size reduces to only 1/20 of that in reference work, while the scheme still performs well. Experimental results show that, compared with a modified TMN8 rate control scheme, our scheme achieves higher PSNR and smoother PSNR variations, retaining the bit rate proximity and buffer regulation.