ETRI Journal, Volume 38, Number 1, February 2016 © 2016 Wei Wu
et al.
185
http://dx.doi.org/10.4218/etrij.16.0114.0366
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
Bjøntegaard 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.
Keywords: High Efficiency Video Coding, rate control,
low delay video coding, R-Q model, bit allocation.
Manuscript received Mar. 25, 2014; revised Apr. 8, 2015, accepted Sept. 10, 2015.
This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under
Grant 61471277, the Ningbo Natural Science Foundation under Grant 2015A610129, the 111
Project under Grant B08038, also supported by ISN State Key Laboratory.
Wei Wu (corresponding author, wwu@xidian.edu.cn), Jiong Liu (liujiong@
mail.xidian.edu.cn), and Lei Feng (fenglei@mail.xidian.edu.cn) are with the State Key
Laboratory of Integrated Services Networks, Xidian University, Xi’an, China.
I. Introduction
To meet the rapid increasing demand of video content, a
new video coding standard called “High Efficiency Video
Coding (HEVC)” [1] was established by the Joint
Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) in January
2013. In contrast to previous video coding standards, HEVC
not only employs a flexible quad-tree coding block
partitioning structure but also improved intra-prediction and
coding and adaptive motion parameter prediction and coding,
both of which significantly improve the coding efficiency.
Apart from the coding efficiency, rate control is also an
important issue in video services [2], particularly for real-time
video communications. The objective of rate control is to
achieve good video quality by adjusting encoding parameters
to prevent a buffer from overflowing and underflowing under
the constraint of transmission bandwidth.
Although rate control is not a normative part of any video
coding standard, every video coding standard has its own
recommendation on rate control for informative purposes [3],
such as reference model [4] for H.261, adaptive quantization
algorithm [5] for MPEG-1, Test Model 5 [6] for MPEG-2, Test
Model Near-term 8 [7] for H.263, Verification Model 18 [8] for
MPEG-4, and JVT-W042 [9], developed based on JVT-G012
[10], for H.264/AVC. In addition to JVT-W042 adopted in
Joint Model, many rate control schemes [11]–[15] have also
been designed for H.264/AVC.
In HEVC, a flexible quad-tree coding block partitioning
structure is adopted that enables the efficient use of multiple
sizes of coding units (CUs), prediction units (PUs), and
transform units (TUs). The CU, PU, and TU define the regions
sharing the same prediction mode, the same prediction
information, and the same transformation. These new features
Novel Rate Control Scheme for
Low Delay Video Coding of HEVC
Wei Wu, Jiong Liu, and Lei Feng