LCU-Level bit allocation for rate control in High Efficiency Video Coding

This paper presents an adaptive bit allocation algorithm for rate control in High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). Video texture complexity reflects the substantial of video content and it is a valuable tool for bit prediction. We discover that, there is always a quasilinear relationship between the coding bit rate and the texture complexity at the LCU level. This linearity leads to a novel and unified rate model for different types of source data. Meanwhile, a simple but accurate model is proposed to estimate the texture complexity by considering the spatial-temporal correlations. Experiments have been carried out to compare the coding performance of our proposed algorithm with existing method. Results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves better rate-distortion performance with a much lower and steadier buffer level.