Efficient frame complexity-based rate control for H.264/AVC intra-frame

This paper presents a rate control (RC) scheme for intra-frame coding in H.264/AVC. An adaptive rate-quantization (R-Q) model is proposed for intra-frames by utilizing the average standard deviation (ASD) to measure the content complexity of each intra-frame. The initial QP decision is based on the distribution of the standard deviation (SD) values of macroblocks (MBs) in the initial frame. The scene change is detected with the complexity difference of adjacent frames and the appropriate quantization parameter (QP) is determined for the scene-transition frame. Experimental results show that the proposed RC scheme achieves more accurate rate estimation and maintains the buffer fullness at a lower level than the state of the art, especially for the sequences containing scene changes.