Publication: A rate control algorithm for scalable video coding
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2011
Defense date
2011-09-19
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Abstract
This thesis proposes a rate control (RC) algorithm for H.264/scalable video coding
(SVC) specially designed for real-time variable bit rate (VBR) applications with
buffer constraints. The VBR controller assumes that consecutive pictures within the
same scene often exhibit similar degrees of complexity, and aims to prevent unnecessary
quantization parameter (QP) fluctuations by allowing for just an incremental
variation of QP with respect to that of the previous picture. In order to adapt this
idea to H.264/SVC, a rate controller is located at each dependency layer (spatial or
coarse grain scalability) so that each rate controller is responsible for determining
the proper QP increment. Actually, one of the main contributions of the thesis is
a QP increment regression model that is based on Gaussian processes. This model
has been derived from some observations drawn from a discrete set of representative
encoding states. Two real-time application scenarios were simulated to assess the
performance of the VBR controller with respect to two well-known RC methods.
The experimental results show that our proposal achieves an excellent performance
in terms of quality consistency, buffer control, adjustment to the target bit rate, and computational complexity.
Moreover, unlike typical RC algorithms for SVC that only satisfy the hypothetical
reference decoder (HRD) constraints for the highest temporal resolution sub-stream
of each dependency layer, the proposed VBR controller also delivers HRD-compliant
sub-streams with lower temporal resolutions.To this end, a novel approach that uses a set of buffers (one per temporal resolution sub-stream) within a dependency layer has been built on top of the RC algorithm.The proposed approach aims to simultaneously control the buffer levels for overflow and underflow prevention, while maximizing the reconstructed video quality of the corresponding sub-streams. This in-layer multibuffer framework for rate-controlled SVC does not require additional dependency layers to deliver different HRD-compliant temporal resolutions for a given video source, thus improving the coding e ciency when compared to typical SVC encoder con gurations since, for the same target bit rate, less layers are encoded.
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Keywords
Video coding, Rate control algorithm