Hardware/Software Codesign of a Low-Cost Rate Control Scheme for H.264/AVC

This paper presents a low-complexity rate control (RC) framework for H.264/advanced video coding (AVC) encoders on embedded systems. We consider not only the rate-distortion performance but also its implementation complexity using an efficient hardware/software codesign. The proposed cost-effective macroblock level RC module works in hardware, and the frame-level RC is executed on the system CPU as software. It is less complex than the RC module adopted by H.264/AVC JM reference software, making it more suitable for embedded systems. Experiment results show that the proposed RC outperforms H.264/AVC JM, and the hardware implementation cost is low for an H.264/AVC video encoder.