Rate control for consistent objective quality in high efficiency video coding

Since video quality fluctuation degrades the visual perception significantly in multimedia communication systems, it is important to maintain a consistent objective quality over the entire video sequence. We propose a rate control algorithm to keep the consistent objective quality in high efficiency video coding (HEVC), which is an upcoming standard video codec. In the proposed algorithm, the probability density function of transformed coefficients is modeled based on a Laplacian function that considers the quadtree coding unit structure, which is one of the characteristics of HEVC. In controlling the video quality, distortion-quantization and rate-quantization models are derived by using the Laplacian function. Based on those models, a quantization parameter is determined to control the quality of the encoded frames where the fluctuation of video quality is minimized and the overflow and underflow of buffer are prevented. From the simulation results, it is shown that the proposed rate control algorithm outperforms the other conventional schemes.