Efficient P-frame complexity estimation for frame layer rate control of H.264/AVC

Rate control plays a significant role for high quality video coding. This paper presents a rate control method for H.264/AVC using a new bit allocation scheme for P-frame. This scheme is based on our proposed P-frame complexity measurement and estimation model. The measurement model considers not only the absolute complexity of the picture via average gradient, but also the relative histogram difference between two frames. Our proposed bit allocation scheme is able to allocate bitrate more efficiently for P-frame, which means allocating more bits to high-complexity frames and less bits to low-complexity ones. Experimental results show that our proposed method is able to achieve better quality than the original JVT-G012 and other existing methods.