Frame level rate control for H.264/AVC with novel Rate-Quantization model

In this paper, a frame level rate control algorithm is proposed with a novel Rate-Quantization (R-Q) model for H.264/AVC. Firstly, a two-stage rate control scheme is adopted to decouple the inter-dependency between Rate Distortion Optimization (RDO) and rate control. Secondly, in order to predict the frame complexity accurately, instead of the Mean Absolute Difference (MAD) of the residual signal, bits information in the RDO-based mode decision process is employed to predict the frame complexity. Thirdly, a self-adaptive exponential R-Q model is proposed for rate control. Experimental results reveal that the proposed R-Q model can estimate the actual output bits very well, and the novel rate control scheme has excellent performance both in bit rate accuracy and coding efficiency as compared to JVT-W043 and the FixedQp tool in the Joint Scalable Video Model reference software.