Rate control in H.

264
ECE 241 Multimedia compression

Harinandan Srinivasamurthy
Winter 2010
 Agenda
• What is rate control?
• Rate control algorithms.
• Factors affecting rate control.
• Experiments.
 Rate control
• Rate control is a method to adjust encoder
parameters to achieve constant bit rate.

Block diagram showing encoder and decoder buffers Source [3]

 Rate control
• This is required because of limited availability
of bandwidth and decoder buffer.
• Statistics of a frame is not known before
encoding. Hence the parameters have to be
predicted for bit allocation.
• The rate has to be chosen such that distortion
is minimized
Rate control algorithms

H.264 rate controller. Source [4]

 Rate control algorithms
• Scalable rate control algorithm and it’s extension

• Where R = encoder rate, Q = Quantization step size, S = Mean

absolute difference of the residual frame, are model parameters.

• Bi is the no of bits, is the variance, Qi the quantization step size,

k, A and C are model parameters
 Factors affecting rate control
• Quantization parameter (QP)
• Motion estimation
• Statistics of the frame
• Group of pictures (GOP)
 Original YUV QP = 15

PSNR Y:48.32 U:50.19 V:50.69

QP = 30 QP = 40

PSNR Y:39.25 U:43.64 V:44.62 PSNR Y:33.64 U:39.01 V:41.49

 Original YUV QP = 15

PSNR Y:46.48 U:48.51 V:49.37

QP = 30 QP = 40

PSNR Y:33.41 U:39.75 V:42.35 PSNR Y:26.33 U:37.29 V:39.31

 Experiments
• Four sets of experiments.
• H.264 Main profile encoder
• First set – Constant QP
• Second set – Target bitrate
• QP vs PSNR
• Bitrate vs PSNR
• QP vs Bitrate
Constant QP
Akiyo Low motion CIF sequence QP=26

PSNR vs Frame nos

Constant QP
Akiyo Low motion CIF sequence QP=26
Akiyo Low motion CIF sequence target bitrate = 250 kbps
Akiyo Low motion CIF sequence target bitrate = 250 kbps
Akiyo Low motion CIF sequence target bitrate = 250 kbps
QP vs PSNR
Bitrate vs PSNR
QP vs Bitrate
 References
• [1] , Gary J. Sullivan, Gisle Bjøntegaard, and Ajay Luthra, Overview of the
H.264/AVC Video Coding Standard, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and
Systems for Video Technology, July 2003
• [2] http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html, x264-snapshot-
20100115-2245.tar
• [3] Iain E.G. Richardson, H.264 and MPEG-4 Video Compression, John Wiley
and Sons, 2003
• [4] http://www.pixeltools.com/rate_control_paper.html
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third edition, 2006
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Video Compression, IEEE Signal Processing magazine, November 1998
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http://neuron2.net/library/avc/overview_x264_v8_5.pdf
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Publishers, 1999
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video Compression: An Overview,” IEEE Signal Processing magazine,
November 1998, pp. 23-50.
• [10] Siwei Ma, Wen Gao, Peng Gao, and Yan Lu,Rate control for Advance
Video Coding (AVC) Standard, IEEE 2003
 References
• [11] Loren Merritt, Rahul Vanam, Improved Rate Control and motion estimation for H.264 encoder,
IEEE International conference on Image processing 2007
•
• [12] Atul Puria, Xuemin Chen, Ajay Luthra, Video coding using the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC compression
standard Elsevier 2004
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optimization scheme for JVT encoder, Proceedings of SPIE, Visual Communications 2003.
•
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Standard: Overview and Introduction to the Fidelity Range Extensions, SPIE Conference on
Applications of Digital Image Processing, August 2004
•
• [15] Marc Servais, Content-Based Motion Compensation and its application to Video Compression,
PhD dissertation, University of Surrey, United Kingdom, February 2006.
•
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compression for multimedia, Morgan Kaufmann, 1998
•
• [17] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MeGUI/x264_Settings
•
• [18] x264 options, http://www.digital-digest.com/articles/x264_options_page1.html
•
• [19] YUV sequences taken from http://trace.eas.asu.edu/yuv/ and
http://www.cipr.rpi.edu/resource/sequences/sif.html