An Efficient H.264 Rate Control Scheme with Accurate theta Estimation

An efficient rate control scheme for H.264 encoding has been proposed, where p domain source modeling, which was first used in block-based DCT coding system such as H.263, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, is introduced. For accurate rate control, parameter thetas, the slope of the linear function of bit rate R vs. p, should be estimated in advance for each frame. Least-Mean-Square (LMS) algorithm is adopted for the estimation of thetas, which is further refined by a new factor thetas-ratio for each frame. Simulation results for standard test sequences show that, compared with JVT-H017, the new algorithm achieves better coding performance, while the output bit rates are more accurate.