A rate allocation model for VVC intercoding using a quality dependency

In this paper, we propose a rate allocation scheme for rate control at both the group-of-pictures (GOP) level and the frame level in versatile video coding (VVC). First, by statistically analysing the quality dependency chain among GOPs in an intraperiod, a GOP-level quality dependency factor (GQDF) is investigated for the intercoding structure in VVC. Second, considering the hierarchical and block-inconsistent quality dependency at the frame level, we model a frame-level quality dependency factor (FQDF) by decomposing distortion into the skip and nonskip components and analysing the dependency of each part. Finally, a unified rate allocation scheme, leveraging the proposed GQDF and FQDF, is seamlessly integrated into the existing VVC rate control framework. The proposed method is implemented within the newest reference software. Experiments suggest that our method achieves desirable compression efficiency and visual quality compared with state-of-the-art methods.