Rate controlling based on effective source-complexity metrics appropriated to H.264/AVC

The paper presents two effective rate-estimation metrics called the DCT-based texture-abundance (DTA) metric and the subband-weighted energy (SWE) for the rate controls of inter-coded-frame and intra-coded frame in H.264/AVC, respectively. In order to generally meet the one-pass processing constraint in H.264 video coding, the rate controller is bound to use the DTA estimate predicted from the nearest stored frame rather than the actual DTA. Hence, an efficient matching method using the standardized motion vector prediction (MVP) is addressed to find the predictive MB of coding MB for proper DTA estimation. For estimating the intra-coded macroblock(MB) source abundance and compensating the inadequacy of predicted inter-coded MBs source abundance, SWE is addressed. Experiment results show that the proposed rate controller based on DTA and SWE can outperform that suggested by JM15.1 [2] in terms of PSNR and buffer fullness stabilization with negligible increased computational complexity with the same type of R-Q-C model.