Convex Programming Formulations for Rate Allocation in Video Coding

  • Authors:
  • Y. Sermadevi;S. S. Hemami;M. Masry

  • Affiliations:
  • Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA;-;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

A rate control technique for video encoding under complex transmission scenarios is presented. A typical application for this method is the transmission of video over variable bit rate channels while accounting for restrictions on the end-to-end delay and decoder buffer size. That the resulting multiple constraints on the source and channel rates may be relaxed without loss of optimality into a set of linear inequality constraints-though they are usually expressed in nonlinear form-is a key insight of this paper. This allows for a systematic treatment of a large class of rate constraints and leads to a convex programming (CP) formulation for rate control. Approximation of the frame distortion-rate data by piecewise linear functions further facilitates an efficient solution based on linear programming (LP), a special case of CP. The LP method provides bounds for the deviation from optimality. Results for a standard video test set show that the proposed method provides solutions with mean square error (MSE) distortion value within 2% of the global minimum across a range of rates. The proposed technique is also applied in conjunction with a perceived distortion measure. Results exhibit significant reduction in blocking artifacts and flicker compared to the use of MSE