A joint rate control scheme for H.264 encoding of multiple video sequences

The objective of joint rate control is to dynamically distribute the channel capacity among video sequences according to their respective complexities, thus a more uniform picture quality and a more efficient utilization of channel capacity are achieved. Most existing approaches are based on MPEG2 coding platform. This paper presents a novel joint rate control scheme for multiple video sequences coding based on H.264 standard. The joint rate control is performed hierarchically from a group of pictures of all sequences down to each picture of every sequence, depending on both the complexity of frames and the buffer occupancy. A novel complexity measure that adapts to the characteristics of H.264 video coding is proposed. An improved joint buffer control strategy, which is extended from that in the single sequence rate control scheme, is applied. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme maintains a good balance in picture quality among the sequences as well as within a sequence.