Low-Delay Rate Control for Real-time.pdf

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MULTIMEDIA, VOL. 8, NO. 3, JUNE 2006 467 Low-Delay Rate Control for Real-time H.264/AVC Video Coding Minqiang Jiang and Nam Ling, Senior Member, IEEE Abstract— This paper presents an efficient rate control scheme Similar to earlier standards, H.264/AVC exploits the spatial, for the H.264/AVC video coding in low-delay environments. In temporal and statistical redundancies in the source video. Since our scheme, we propose an enhancement to the buffer-status the level of redundancy changes from frame to frame, the based H.264/AVC bit allocation method. The enhancement is by using a PSNR-based frame complexity estimation to improve the number of bits generated per frame is inherently variable. To existing mean absolute difference based (MAD-based) complexity enable coded video to be transmitted over a constant bit rate measure. Bit allocation to each frame is not just computed by (CBR) channel, a buffer must be placed between the encoder encoder buffer status but also adjusted by a combined frame and the transmission channel to smooth out the variable output complexity measure. To prevent the buffer from undesirable rate. A rate control scheme then must be employed during overflow or underflow under small buffer size constraint in low delay environment, the computed quantization parameter (QP) the video compression process to adjust coding parameters for the current MB is adjusted based on actual encoding results at to prevent buffer from overflow or underflow. While a stable that point. We also propose to compare the bits produced by each