Single pass dependent bit allocation for H.264 temporal scalability

In this paper, we propose a single-pass dependent bit allocation algorithm for H.264/SVC hierarchical B-pictures. To develop a practical bit allocation algorithm, we use the number of skipped blocks and the ratio of the mean absolute difference (MAD) as features to measure the inter-layer signal dependence of input video signals. The proposed algorithm performs bit allocation at the target bit rate with two steps: the group-of-picture (GOP) based rate control and adaptive temporal layer quantization parameter (QP) decision. The superior performance of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated by experimental results, which is compared with two other one-pass bit allocation algorithms in the literature.