H.264/AVC rate control scheme with frame coding complexity optimized selection

Rate control regulates the output bit rate of a video encoder to obtain optimum visual quality within the available network bandwidth and maintain buffer fullness within a specified tolerance range. The quadratic rate-distortion model is widely adopted in H.264/AVC rate control. However the quadratic model is not precise in terms of the estimation and computation of frame coding complexity. To achieve excellent rate control performance, the paper proposes a novel rate control scheme based on the optimized selection for frame coding complexity. Simulation results indicate that, compared with JM13.2, the new rate control algorithm gets more accurate rate regulation, provides robust buffer control, and efficiently reduces frame skipping. Furthermore, the PSNR gains for QCIF sequences are high up to 0.99dB under all inter-frame encoding formats.