GOP-based Rate Control for H.264/SVC with Hierarchical B-pictures

A GOP-based rate control algorithm for hierarchical B-pictures in H.264/SVC is proposed in this work. The problem is firstly formulated as a bit allocation problem among different temporal layers. Due to the dependency of these layers, we propose a Q-selection tree solution framework. The monotonicity property is exploited to prune the Q-selection tree. Then, the rate-distortion (R-D) data is calculated at a selected set of leaf nodes in any admissible Q-selection tree. The R-D data of other leaf nodes are interpolated using the log-linearity property of a local R-D model. It is shown by experiments that the proposed algorithm achieves a significant coding gain improvement at different target bit rates.