Joint rate control for MPEG-2 encoding of multiple video sequences

This paper presents a joint rate control mechanism for MPEG-2 encoding of multiple video sequences. Our method does not require pre-processing of the video signals prior to encoding. The joint rate control is implemented at the frame level, requiring the encoders to communicate amongst each other only once per frame. Experimental results show that our joint rate control yields better performance than other existing methods. The results also show that our joint rate control coding improves the picture quality of the complex video sequences by assigning them more bits, and maintains a good balance in picture quality among the sequences.