Simultaneous RD-optimized rate control and video de-noising

In this paper, we propose a simultaneous rate control and video de-noising algorithm based on rate distortion optimization. According to our previous works, video de-noising can be performed by using rate distortion optimization with a lower bound quantization parameter (QP) constraint, where the lower bound QP is determined by the noise variance. Then, we find that the macroblock level rate control method in H.264 can be seen as an approximate solution of a rate distortion optimization problem with a specified rate distortion function. Based on these two studies, we integrate the video de-noising problem and rate control problem to a rate distortion optimization problem. We show the convexity of the problem and derive the optimal solution. To reduce the complexity, we propose to use a suboptimal solution based on simply thresholding. Some experiments are conducted to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method.