A novel rate control scheme for H.264/SVC base layer

A novel rate control scheme for H.264/SVC base layer is presented in this paper. At first, a new mean-absolute-difference (MAD) estimation method is introduced to replace the traditional MAD linear prediction model. This new method could reduce the computation complexity sharply and decrease the MAD estimation error by up to 35.6%. Then, the quadratic rate quantization (R-Q) model and the linear R-Q model from Yang Liu et al. (2007) are introduced to describe the relation between the sum of texture bits and non-texture bits and the quantization parameters (QP). Meanwhile, temporal and spatial windows are designed to select data points for the update of above two R-Q models at frame level and basic unit (BU) level respectively. Furthermore, a linear distortion quantization (D-Q) model is formulated. Combining this D-Q model with the linear R-Q model, a simple close-form solution is developed to derive optimal QP for achieving optimal bit allocation at BU level. At last, based on above three ideas, a rate control scheme is proposed for H.264/SVC base layer. Compared with the rate control scheme JVT-G012 which is adopted by the H.264/SVC base layer, the proposed rate control scheme could increase the average luminance PSNR of reconstructed video by up to 0.58 dB.