Single-pass distortion-smoothing encoding for low bit-rate video streaming applications

This paper proposes a rate control scheme for smoothing distortion in low bit-rate video coding. We focus on single-pass encoding that is applicable to both live and off-line streaming. The new rate control tends to achieve slow and smooth distortion variation over time. Without the knowledge of future frames, statistics of previously coded frames are used to derive the expected distortion for the current frame. Constraints of decoder buffer size and pre-loading time are considered in the design. The proposed technique is based on the rate and distortion models used in the TMN8. Its advantages have been shown by experiments.