An Improved Rate Control Method Based on Modification at Scene Change for H.264

This paper presents an improved rate control method for H.264. First, the scene changes are detected by the average absolute difference of the brightness histograms between the adja-cent frames. Then, the bit allocation and quantization parameters are adjusted, using a certain threshold. In addition, the calculation of the mean absolute difference (MAD) is modified in an alterna-tive way, which makes the rate distortion optimization (RDO) more accurate. Extensive simulation results show that the pro-posed method, compared with G012, can improve the average peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and moderate the image quality.