A novel rate-quality model based H.264/AVC frame layer rate control method

Rate control plays an important role in video coding and transmission. In this paper, instead of using rate- distortion (R-D) model to perform rate control as many existing methods do, a rate-quality (R-Q) model of H.264/AVC has first been proposed to represent the coding characteristics of H.264, where PSNR (peak signal-to-noise ratio) is used to represent the reconstructed video quality. Then a H.264 rate control method at frame layer has been presented based on the proposed R-Q model. In this method, the quantization parameter (i.e. quantization step) of the current frame is determined by the proposed R-Q model according to the coding statistics of the previous coded frames. The experimental results show that, compared with the rate control algorithm of JM86 reference software, the output bit rate achieved by our proposed one is more close to the target bit rate while the reconstructed quality is comparable.