Adaptive initial quantization parameter selection for H.264/SVC rate control

Initial quantization parameter (QP) selection is critical for the overall performance of video rate control. In this paper, we propose an adaptive initial QP selection algorithm for H.264/AVC Scalable Extension (SVC) rate control. The proposed algorithm introduces a number of efficient methods, including a coding complexity measure for intra-frames, and a rate-complexity-quantization (R-C-Q) model to accurately determine initial QPs for H.264/SVC rate control. Our experimental results demonstrate that, the proposed initial QP selection algorithm outperforms the one of JVT-W043 rate control scheme, adopted in the H.264/SVC reference software, by providing more accurate initial QP prediction, reducing buffer overflow/underflow, depressing quality fluctuations, and finally, improves the overall coding quality by up to 0.48dB.