Consistent Quality Oriented Rate Control in HEVC via Balancing Intra and Inter Frame Coding

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel rate control method for HEVC that balances intra and inter frame coding to achieve consistent quality, significantly reducing quality fluctuations while maintaining good rate-distortion performance.

Contribution

It proposes a new framework for intra frame quantization prediction and a feature selection method for balanced rate control in HEVC, addressing the trade-off between intra and inter coding.

Findings

Reduces quality fluctuation by 37.2% in PSNR variance

Decreases SSIM variance by 45.1%

Maintains satisfactory rate-distortion and buffer control performance

Abstract

Consistent quality oriented rate control in video coding has attracted much more attention. However, the existing efforts only focus on decreasing variations between every two adjacent frames, but neglect coding trade-off problem between intra and inter frames. In this paper, we deal with it from a new perspective, where intra frame quantization parameter (IQP) and rate control are optimized for balanced coding. First, due to the importance of intra frames, a new framework is proposed for consistent quality oriented IQP prediction, and then we remove unqualified IQP candidates using the proposed penalty term. Second, we extensively evaluate possible features, and select target bits per pixel for all remaining frames, average and standard variance of frame QPs, where equivalent acquisition methods for QP features are given. Third, predicted IQPs are clipped effectively according to bandwidth and previous information for better bit rate accuracy. Compared with High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) reference baseline, experiments demonstrate that our method reduces quality fluctuation greatly by 37.2% on frame-level standard variance of peak-signal-noise-ratio (PSNR) and 45.1% on that of structural similarity (SSIM). Moreover, it also can have satisfactory results on Rate-Distortion (R-D) performance, bit accuracy and buffer control.