A novel incremental rate control scheme for H.264 video coding

In this paper, we propose a new incremental rate control scheme for H.264/AVC video coding, which elegantly resolves the "Chicken and Egg" dilemma by eliminating the need of coding complexity prediction for inter-frames. The proposed scheme introduces a number of new features, including a rate- complexity-quantization model, accurate quantization parameter (QP) estimation for intra-frames, incremental QP calculation for inter-frames, and a basic unit level QP adjustment. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the JVT-G012 solution by providing more accurate rate control, reducing frame skipping, and decreasing quality fluctuations, and finally, improving coding quality by up to 1.85 dB.