On enhancing H.264 rate control by PSNR-based frame complexity estimation

Abstract

This work presents an enhancement to the frame layer buffer status-based H.264 rate control method. The enhancement is by using a PSNR-based frame complexity estimation to improve the existing mean absolute difference based (MAD-based) complexity measure. Bit allocation to each frame is not just computed by encoder buffer status but also adjusted by a combined frame complexity measure. Simulation results show that the H.264 encoder, using the proposed algorithm, can achieve better visual performance than that of the existing H.264 JVT rate control method (JVT/spl I.bar/G012).