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Rate Control for H.264 with Two-Step Quantization Parameter Determination but Single-Pass Encoding

EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing volume 2006, Article number: 063409 (2006) Cite this article

Abstract

We present an efficient rate control strategy for H.264 in order to maximize the video quality by appropriately determining the quantization parameter (QP) for each macroblock. To break the chicken-and-egg dilemma resulting from QP-dependent rate-distortion optimization (RDO) in H.264, a preanalysis phase is conducted to gain the necessary source information, and then the coarse QP is decided for rate-distortion (RD) estimation. After motion estimation, we further refine the QP of each mode using the obtained actual standard deviation of motion-compensated residues. In the encoding process, RDO only performs once for each macroblock, thus one-pass, while QP determination is conducted twice. Therefore, the increase of computational complexity is small compared to that of the JM 9.3 software. Experimental results indicate that our rate control scheme with two-step QP determination but single-pass encoding not only effectively improves the average PSNR but also controls the target bit rates well.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Image Communication and Information Processing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200030, China

    Xiaokang Yang & Yongmin Tan

  2. Department of Computer Engineering, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA, 95053-0566, USA

    Nam Ling

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  1. Xiaokang Yang
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  2. Yongmin Tan
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  3. Nam Ling
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Correspondence to Xiaokang Yang.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Yang, X., Tan, Y. & Ling, N. Rate Control for H.264 with Two-Step Quantization Parameter Determination but Single-Pass Encoding. EURASIP J. Adv. Signal Process. 2006, 063409 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1155/ASP/2006/63409

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1155/ASP/2006/63409

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