• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.193-206
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• 2017

In this paper, we propose a rate control method based on the $R-{\lambda}$ model that supports a parallel encoding structure in GOP levels or IDR period levels for 4K UHD input video in real-time. For this, a slice-level bit allocation method is proposed for parallel encoding instead of sequential encoding. When a rate control algorithm is applied in the GOP level or IDR period level parallelism, the information of how many bits are consumed cannot be shared among the frames belonging to a same frame level except the lowest frame level of the hierarchical B structure. Therefore, it is impossible to manage the bit budget with the existing bit allocation method. In order to solve this problem, we improve the bit allocation procedure of the conventional ones that allocate target bits sequentially according to the encoding order. That is, the proposed bit allocation strategy is to assign the target bits in GOPs first, then to distribute the assigned target bits from the lowest depth level to the highest depth level of the HEVC hierarchical B structure within each GOP. In addition, we proposed a processing method that is used to improve subjective image qualities by allocating the bits according to the coding complexities of the frames. Experimental results show that the proposed bit allocation method works well for frame-level parallel HEVC software encoders and it is confirmed that the performance of our rate controller can be improved with a more elaborate bit allocation strategy by using the preprocessing results.