Rate control of hierarchical B prediction structure for multi-view video coding

Rate control plays an important role in regulating bit streams in video coding. In order to obtain good coding performance, the hierarchical B prediction structure has been adopted in Multi-view Video Coding (MVC). However, the conventional rate control scheme is not efficient in the hierarchical B prediction structure. In this paper, we propose a rate control algorithm to address this problem. First, the accurate estimation of Mean Absolute Distortion (MAD) of the current frame is desired for both quantization parameter (QP) selection and Rate Distortion Optimization (RDO). Considering the hierarchical B structure, a bi-directional MAD prediction model is proposed to predict the MAD of the current frame by using the actual MADs of the encoded frames in the lower Temporal Layers (TLs). Second, the number of header bits has a close relationship with the TLs in the hierarchical B prediction structure. Therefore, we propose an enhanced prediction method in which a proportional relationship of the header bits is introduced if the frames are located in different TLs. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithm can achieve both accurate target bit rate and good coding performance.