Rate control for consistent visual quality of H.264/AVC encoding

  • Authors:

  • Long Xu;Sam Kwong;Hanli Wang;Debin Zhao;Wen Gao

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong and School of Automation and Electrical Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing 10083, C ...;Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong;Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, China and Key Laboratory of Embedded System and Service Computing, Ministry of Education, Tongji University, Shan ...;Department of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China;School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China

  • Venue:
  • Image Communication
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

In this paper, a novel rate control scheme with sliding window basic unit is proposed to achieve consistent or smooth visual quality for H.264/AVC based video streaming. A sliding window consists of a group of successive frames and moves forward by one frame each time. To make the sliding window scheme possible for real-time video streaming, the initial encoder delay inherently in a video streaming system is utilized to generate all the bits of a window in advance, so that these bits for transmission are ready before their due time. The use of initial encoder delay does not introduce any additional delay in video streaming but benefits visual quality as compared to traditional one-pass rate control algorithms of H.264/AVC. Then, a Sliding Window Buffer Checking (SWBC) algorithm is proposed for buffer control at sliding window level and it accords with traditional buffer measurement of H.264/AVC. Extensive experimental results exhibit that higher coding performance, consistent visual quality and compliant buffer constraint can be achieved by the proposed algorithm.