Rate estimation for H.264/AVC spatial resolution reduction

The emergence of wireless networks has posed new challenges for multimedia content providers. In particular, many existing video contents have bit-rates and resolutions far exceeding the capability of wireless networks and mobile devices and they need to be adapted before transmission. In this paper, we propose a technique using ρ-domain information to estimate the bit rate of down-sampled video in the H.264/AVC format. The bit rate is estimated in two stages. In the initialization stage, we use a low-complexity algorithm to estimate the ρ-domain parameters for half and quarter resolutions, respectively. In the refinement stage, the estimation error is feed-forwarded to improve the estimation accuracy. Experimental results show that the proposed technique can estimate the bit rate accurately at a wide range of down-sampling ratios.