Rate control of H.263 for low bit rate visual communication

H.263 is an emerging video compression standard for low bit rate visual communication. A new rate control for H.263 is studied. The requirements for the rate control algorithm depend on the applications. For more flexible rate control, the frame rate is considered as a control variable. A frame rate control algorithm which can minimize the temporal quality degradation caused by a variable frame rate and estimate the supportable frame rate fast, is proposed. Also, an efficient global bit allocation algorithm of H.263, which can guarantee the reasonable sub-optimality and reduce the computational complexity, is proposed. Finally, experimental results are provided to demonstrate the better performance of the proposed scheme.