Adaptive rate control for High Efficiency Video Coding

Abstract

A frame level adaptive rate control scheme for the emerging High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard is proposed in this paper, where both rate model and distortion model are provided. For rate modeling, a new rate model is proposed based on the weighted complexity estimation of the previously encoded frames. For distortion modeling, the distortion is modeled as an exponential function of the sum of absolute transformed difference (SATD) and the quantization parameter of the current frame. Moreover, a quality smoothing method based on the distortion model is proposed to reduce the quality fluctuation. The proposed rate control algorithm is implemented into HM5.0. The proposed scheme can control the bitrate accurately with smoothing quality, and the coding gain compared with state-of-the-art technique is up to 0.64dB for LB HE & LB LC, 0.33dB, 0.31dB, 0.42dB, 0.44dB for LP HE, LP LC, RA HE and RA LC respectively.