Forward rate control strategy based on the rate distortion theory for video coding

A novel Forward Rate Control (FRC) strategy based on the rate distortion theory is proposed in this paper. The new FRC allocates the target number of bits for each macroblock according to the local spatial activity as well as the communication channel bitrate, so that an optimum bit allocation can be obtained from the modeled image data and from the buffer fullness. The resulted subjective quality tests for flower garden and football sequences (at 3 Mbps, 704x480, 30 Hz and 4:2:0 format) show that the proposed FRC strategy improves the quality of the reconstructed pictures considerably over the conventional one. The tests based on the objective criterion gives out an averaging one dB PSNR gain over the TM5 buffer controlling strategy.