Buffer constrained rate control for low bitrate dual-frame video coding

In dual-frame video coding, one long-term reference (LTR) and one short-term reference (STR) frames are used for motion estimation and compensation. In previous work, it was shown that the performance of video coding can be improved by pulsing the quality of LTR frames in dual-frame video coding, but this increases the encoder delay buffer size. Also, buffer constrained real-time video transmission requires an efficient rate control algorithm to meet the delay requirement. In this paper, we propose a rate control algorithm for dual- frame video coding under a delay buffer constraint. With the proposed rate control algorithm and motion activity detection for determining the LTR quality, simulation results using H.264/AVC show a significant PSNR improvement over H.264 rate control and other rate control algorithms for dual- frame video coding.