Quadratic curve based buffer management for H.264/AVC rate control

Buffer management is an essential element in rate control to regulate the behavior of the virtual output buffer of video encoder. In this paper, a novel quadratic curve based buffer management (QCBM) method for H.264/AVC rate control is proposed. This method considers the features of video coding and employs a quadratic curve, which is obtained according to the initial buffer fullness, target buffer fullness and the length of a group of pictures, to determine the frame layer target buffer fullness for the current coding frame. Consequently, the P-frames closer to the reference I-frame of the group of pictures would have more target bits and higher coding qualities, which leads to improvement of the performance of video encoder. Experimental results demonstrate that using the proposed buffer management method, a better rate-distortion performance can be achieved than that using the original H.264/AVC rate control.Begin the abstract two lines below author names and addresses.

I. Introduction

The ultimate objective of video coding and transmission is to provide the best reconstructed video quality at the destination under certain constrained network conditions. To regulate varying bit rate characteristics of the coded bitstream, an encoder employs rate control to produce high quality decoded pictures at bit rates that are provided by the network [1]. Even for the storage video applications free of bandwidth limits, rate control is still indispensable because the decoder buffer is not infinite. Rate control has been widely studied in digital video coding standards and applications, such as TM5 [2] for MPEG-2, TMN8 [3] for H.263, VM8 [4] for MPEG-4, the adaptive rate control method [5] [6] for H.264/AVC [7], and so on.