Advanced real-time rate control in H.264

Most existing rate control schemes in the literature use one rate model and calculate quantization parameters of the macro-blocks (MB), regardless of MB types. In advanced video coding standards such as H.264, MBs belong to more advanced MB types, such as skipped and non-skipped MBs. In non-skipped MBs, the encoder determines whether each of W luminance sub-blocks and 4x4 chrominance sub-block of a MB is to be encoded, giving the different number of sub-blocks at each MB encoding times. As a result, a traditional single rate model is insufficient to represent each MB accurately. In this work, it is found that different MB types have different rate behavior. Under different conditions of MB types, we establish novel different rate models and distortion models. Our rate control scheme is proposed based on these models. The experimental results suggest that our scheme can achieve PSNR gain over JM10.2 and TMN8.