MINMAX frame rate control using a rate-distortion optimized wavelet coder

This paper proposes a frame rate-control scheme with a MINMAX distortion criterion in the framework of a rate-distortion optimized motion compensated embedded wavelet coder. The MINMAX criterion aims to minimize the maximum distortion in a group of pictures (GOP) for a given bit rate. The proposed frame level bit allocation scheme combined with R-D optimized within frame allocation allows precise rate control up to the exact bit. A simplifying fast algorithm is developed using an initial prediction of the operating distortion and adaptive adjustment during GOP coding. Experiments demonstrate that as much as 1.1 dB gain over MPEG-2 TM5 and 0.9 dB over H263 TMN5 can be achieved as well as more consistent visual quality