A novel rate control method for H.264/AVC based on frame complexity and importance

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new rate-control algorithm based on frame complexity and importance (CI) for H.264/AVC video coding. The proposed method aims at selecting accurate quantization parameters for inter-coded frames according to the target bit rates, by accurately predicting frame CI using the statistics of previously encoded frames. Bit budget is allocated to each frame adaptively updated according to its CI, combined with the buffer status. We compare the proposed method with JVT-G012 used by H.264/AVC with the software JM10.1. The PSNR performance of video coding is improved by the proposed method from 0.142 to 0.953 dB, and the BDPSNR performance is improved from 0.248 to 0.541dB. The proposed method can also provide more consistent visual quality and alleviated sharp drops for frames caused by high motions or scene changes with the PSNR standard deviation decreases from 0.134 to 1.514dB. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.