Model Predictive Hierarchical Rate Control With Markov Decision Process for Multiview Video Coding

This paper presents a novel hierarchical rate control (HRC) for the Multiview Video Coding standard targeting improved bandwidth usage and high video quality. The HRC is designed to jointly address the rate control at both frame level and basic unit (BU) level. The proposed scheme is able to exploit the bitrate distribution correlation with neighboring frames to efficiently predict the future bitrate behavior by employing a model predictive control that defines a proper control action through quantization parameter (QP) adaptation. To provide a fine-grained tuning, the QP is further adapted within each frame by a Markov decision process implemented at BU level able to take into consideration a map of the regions of interest. A coupled frame/BU level feedback is performed in order to guarantee the system consistency. Experimental results show the superiority of our HRC compared to state-of-the-art solutions in terms of bitrate allocation accuracy and rate distortion while delivering smooth video quality at frame and BU levels.