A perceptual-based rate control for HEVC

In this paper, a perceptual-based rate control algorithm for the high efficiency video coding (HEVC) is proposed. Since the human visual system (HVS) is highly sensitive to edge information inherited in image and video contents, gradient magnitude is considered a very effective attribute on the computation of the spatial perceptual characteristics (SPC) and the temporal perceptual characteristic (TPC). The latter is further computed based on the gradient magnitude similarity deviation (GMSD). The combined perceptual characteristic of SPC and TPC is then used to guide the bit allocation process for each CTU. Experimental results have clearly shown that the proposed perceptual rate control scheme can achieve superior perceptual coding performance, compared with the original R-A rate control adopted in the HEVC.