Macroblock level rate control of SVC spatial-SNR scalability

Scalable video coding (SVC) addresses the application need of a more flexible format of coded video in heterogeneous and time-varying environments. Rate control (RC) plays an important role in allocating H.264/SVC bits to adapt to the actual channel bandwidth and meanwhile to achieve high-quality reconstructed images. A macroblock level rate control algorithm based on layer level and MB level bit-rate allocation is proposed for SVC spatial and MGS scalability in this paper. At the same time, layer level buffer control is used. The coding process of each layer is controlled by a respective buffer controller and a train of RC parameters. The accurate bit-rate can be achieved and the maximum mismatch between actual bit-rate and target bit-rate can be maintained, using the proposed algorithm. Comparing with FixQpEncoder adopted in the joint scalable video model (JSVM), high peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) can be obtained without multiple iterative and the complexity is reduced. The proposed algorithm can meet the real-time demand.