A new rate control scheme for H.264 video coding

The H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video coding standard is very promising due to its high coding efficiency. In this paper, we propose a new constant bit rate control method based on the rate-distortion model of TMN8. The novelty of our approach is to use simple preprocessing to achieve the target bit rate more accurately, better target bit allocation and buffer management for both frame-level and macroblock-level rate control, improved perceptual quality, and adoption of virtual frame skipping. Simulations show that our method can meet the target bitrate very accurately, even for content with scene changes and scene transitions, and achieves both good subjective and objective quality. In addition, our approach adds little complexity to the encoder, and can therefore be used for a real-time encoder.