A simple rate control framework for single-pass variable bit rate MPEG encoder

The purpose of the rate controller in a MPEG encoder is to allocate bit budget for each picture, and adjusts the quantization scale of each macroblock to control the actual used bits to close to the allocated bit budget for a picture. Multi-pass coding can allocate sufficient bit budget for each picture, but cannot be utilized in the real-time single-pass application. In the proposed algorithm, the complexity of the current picture can be easily obtained from the motion estimation, and therefore can allocate the bit budget for the picture more precisely to maintain a uniform visual quality from picture to picture. An initial quantization scale can also be estimated to increase the coding quality. The extremely simple structure of this framework can be easily implemented as a real-time video coding system by hardware as well as software.