System Design of Perceptual Quality-Regulable H.264 Video Encoder

In this work, a perceptual quality-regulable H.264 video encoder system has been developed. Exploiting the relationship between the reconstructed macro block and its best predicted macro block from mode decision, a novel quantization parameter prediction method is built and used to regulate the video quality according to a target perceptual quality. An automatic quality refinement scheme is also developed to achieve a better usage of bit budget. Moreover, with the aid of salient object detection, we further improve the quality on where human might focus on. The proposed algorithm achieves better bit allocation for video coding system by changing quantization parameters at macro block level. Compared to JM reference software with macro block layer rate control, the proposed algorithm achieves better and more stable quality with higher average SSIM index and smaller SSIM variation.