Masking Effects Based Rate Control Scheme for High Efficiency Video Coding

This paper presents a masking effects based rate control scheme for high efficiency video coding (HEVC). Rate control is regarded as a very effective tool to improve the performance of video coding under the limited bandwidth. However, the state-of-the-art rate control algorithm based on R-X model ignores the characteristics of human visual system (HVS), which leads to poor performance in subjective quality. Moreover, some structural similarity (SSIM) or saliency based perceptual rate control algorithms only consider spatial characteristics. Since spatial and temporal visual masking effects can better reflect the characteristics of HVS, in this paper masking effects based perceptual factor for coding tree unit (CTU) is proposed, which takes both texture complexity and motion information into account. Then the proposed perceptual factor is utilized to guide bit allocation in CTU-level rate control. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can effectively improve the coding performance compared with the R-λ algorithm.