Rate control to reduce bitrate fluctuation on HEVC

This paper proposes a frame-level rate control algorithm for low delay video applications to reduce the fluctuations in the bitrate. The proposed algorithm minimizes the bitrate fluctuations in two ways with minimal coding loss. First, the proposed rate control applies R-Q model to all frames including the first frame of every group of pictures (GOP) except for the first one of a sequence. Conventional rate control algorithms do not use any R-Q models for the first frame of each GOP and do not estimate the generated-bit. An unexpected output rate result from the first frame affects the remainder of the pictures in the rate control. Second, a rate-distortion (R-D) cost is calculated regardless of the hierarchical coding structure for low bitrate fluctuations because the hierarchical coding structure controls the output bitrate in rate distortion optimization (RDO) process. The experimental results show that the average variance of per-frame bits with the proposed algorithm can reduce by approximately 33.8% with a delta peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) degradation of 1.4dB for a "low-delay B" coding structure and by approximately 35.7% with a delta-PSNR degradation of 1.3dB for a "low-delay P" coding structure, compared to HM 8.0 rate control.