Adaptive Rate Control Algorithm for H.264/AVC Considering Scene Change

Copyright c 2013 X. Chen and F. Lu. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Scene change in H. 264 video sequences has significant impact on the video communication quality. This paper presents a novel adaptive rate control algorithm with little additional calculation for H. 264/AVC based on the scene change expression. According to the frame complexity quotiety, we define a scene change factor. It is used to allocate bits for each frame adaptively. Experimental results show that it can handle the scene change effectively. Our algorithm, in comparison to the JVT-G012 algorithm, reduces rate error and improves average peak signal-noise ratio with smaller deviation. It cannot only control bit rate accurately, but also get better video quality with the lower encoder buffer fullness to improve the quality of service.