Effective intra-only rate control for H.264/AVC

Rate control in H.264/AVC aims to achieve the best tradeoff between encoding quality and bandwidth while satisfying the buffer restriction. Due to the improving efficiency of intra-only rate control, we propose an effective rate control scheme for intra-only encoding. The proposed scheme employs a novel rate-distortion (RD) model, a new complexity measure, a precise quantization parameter (QP) calculation method, and a simple but effective model adaptation mechanism for intra-frames. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with JVT-W042, the proposed algorithm achieves higher precise bit estimation, provides more robust buffer control, and improves coding quality.