Constant frame quality control for H.264/AVC

A frame quality control mechanism for H.264/AVC is proposed in this research. The research objective is to ensure that a suitable Quantization Parameter (QP) can be assigned to each frame so that the target frame quality can be achieved. One application is consistently maintaining the frame quality during the encoding process to facilitate such applications of video archiving or surveillance. A single-parameter Distortion to Quantization (D-Q) model is derived by training a large number of frame blocks and this model parameter can be determined by the frame content. Given the target quality for a video frame, we can then select an appropriate QP according to the proposed D-Q model. The model refinement and QP adjustment of subsequent frames can be applied according to the coding results of previous data. Structural Similarity (SSIM) is chosen as the quality measurement to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed framework.