Region-Based Rate-Control for H.264/AVC for Low Bit-Rate Applications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a region-based rate-control scheme for H.264/AVC that adaptively allocates bits based on regional characteristics, improving coding efficiency and quality at low bit-rates.

Contribution

It proposes a novel region-based rate-control method that considers regional characteristics and uses linear models for better rate-distortion optimization.

Findings

Achieves better subjective and objective quality.

Outperforms conventional rate-control methods.

Adapts rate-control to content characteristics.

Abstract

Rate-control plays an important role in video coding. However, in the conventional rate-control algorithms, the number and position of Macroblocks (MBs) inside one basic unit for rate-control is inflexible and predetermined. The different characteristics of the MBs are not fully considered. Also, there is no overall optimization of the coding of basic units. This paper proposes a new region-based rate-control scheme for H.264/AVC to improve the coding efficiency. The inter-frame information is explored to objectively divide one frame into multiple regions based on their rate-distortion behaviors. The MBs with the similar characteristics are classified into the same region, and the entire region instead of a single MB or a group of contiguous MBs is treated as a basic unit for rate-control. A linear rate-quantization stepsize model and a linear distortion-quantization stepsize model are proposed to accurately describe the rate-distortion characteristics for the region-based basic units. Moreover, based on the above linear models, an overall optimization model is proposed to obtain suitable Quantization Parameters (QPs) for the region-based basic units. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed region-based rate-control approach can achieve both better subjective and objective quality by performing the rate-control adaptively with the content, compared to the conventional rate-control approaches.