Quadratic modeling rate control in the emerging HEVC standard

The High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standardization project mainly aims at improving the compression efficiency beyond the state-of-the-art H.264/AVC standard for high and ultra high definition video contents. The HEVC codec reference software, still under development, encodes video content using a fixed quantization step, thus leading to a variable bitrate stream which may not be suitable for the many multimedia applications where a constant bandwidth is required. Therefore, a rate control algorithm must be integrated in the HEVC codec taking into account that the novel coding tools further reduce the bitrate associated to texture data while increase the bitrate associated to the auxiliary information, e.g. motion vectors and coding modes. In this context, this paper studies the integration of a quadratic modeling rate control algorithm in the HEVC codec. Experimental results reveal that the rate control enabled HEVC codec provides a lower rate-distortion performance regarding a fixed quantization step HEVC codec, notably spending up to 20.12% more bitrate for the same objective quality. However, the integrated rate control algorithm offers lower bitrate fluctuations along the video contents than the HEVC codec with fixed quantization step.