Improved rate control using statistical information in unit-layer for H.264/AVC video coding

The purpose of this paper is to improve allocation of the number of bits by accurately estimating the target bits in H.264/AVC rate control. In our scheme, we propose an enhancement method of the target unit-layer bit allocation. The enhancement uses a frame and unit complexity estimation to improve the existing mean absolute difference (MAD) complexity measurement. Using the statistical characteristics, we obtained the change in occurrence bits about Quantization Parameter (QP) to apply the bit amount by QP from the video characteristic, and applied this to the estimated bit amount of the current frame. The simulation results show that the proposed rate control scheme not only achieved time savings of more than 99% over the existing rate control algorithm, but also that the PSNR and bit rate were almost the same as the performance in all sequences.