A new rate-complexity-QP algorithm (RCQA) for HEVC intra-picture rate control

To accommodate the increasing video streams over the limited Internet bandwidth, bit-rate control is an indispensable component for the high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard. In this paper, we propose a novel Rate-Complexity-QP (RCQ) model for HEVC intra-picture rate control. The proposed RCQ model includes a linear distortion-quantization, an exponential rate-quantization and a linear rate-complexity model. While taking the coding characteristics of HEVC and picture complexity into account, a new RCQ-based rate control algorithm, namely RCQA, is proposed and implemented in the reference software HM 9.1. Our extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can maintain an accurate bit-rate control and steady buffer size during the coding process. The rate control accuracy of RCQA is shown 10 times better than the integrated rate control in HM 9.1 and the BD-rate of RCQA can be up to -5.1%.