Initial quantization parameter determination for H.264/SVC

The initial quantization parameter for the first I-frame is vital for the rate-control performance of an H.264 scalable video encoder. In this paper, we propose an efficient method for determining the initial quantization parameter. The initial quantization parameter is derived from both the target bit rate and the content complexity of the first I-frame, where the latter is calculated in terms of entropy information and mutual information. Experimental results show that the proposed method is more accurate and achieves better visual quality and smaller fluctuation of PSNR, as compared to the state-of-the-art approaches in the literature.