Improved FMO based H.264 frame layer rate control for low bit rate video transmission

The use of Flexible Macroblock Ordering (FMO) in H.264/AVC as an error-resilient tool incurs extra overhead bits that reduces coding efficiency at low bit rate. To improve coding efficiency, we present an improved frame-layer H.264/AVC rate control that takes into consideration the effects of using FMO for video transmission. In this paper, we propose a new header bits model, an enhanced frame complexity measure and a quantization parameter (QP) adjustment scheme. Simulation results show that the proposed method performed better than the existing frame layer rate control with FMO enabled using different number of slice groups.