Novel Rate Control Scheme for Low Delay Video Coding of HEVC

In this paper, a novel rate control scheme for low delay video coding of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is proposed. The proposed scheme is developed by considering a new temporal prediction structure of HEVC. In the proposed scheme, the relationship between bit rate and quantization step is exploited firstly to formulate an accurate quadratic rate-quantization (R-Q) model. Secondly, a method of determining the quantization parameters (QPs) for the first frames within a group of pictures is proposed. Thirdly, an accurate frame-level bit allocation method is proposed for HEVC. Finally, based on the proposed R-Q model and the target bit allocated for the frame, the QPs are predicted for coding tree units by using rate-distortion (R-D) optimization. We compare our scheme against that of three other state-of-the-art rate control schemes. Experimental results show that the proposed rate control scheme can increase the Bjontegaard delta peak signal-to-noise ratio by 0.65 dB and 0.09 dB on average compared with the JCTVC-I0094 and JCTVC-M0036 schemes, respectively, both of which have been implemented in an HEVC test model encoder; furthermore, the proposed scheme achieves a similar R-D performance to Wang's scheme, as well as obtaining the smallest bit rate mismatch error of all the schemes.