Rho-Domain for low-complexity rate control on MPEG-4 Scalable Video Coding

Yohann Pitrey (1) , Yann Serrand (1) , Marie Babel (1) , Olivier Déforges (2)

1 IETR - Institut d'Electronique et de Télécommunications de Rennes
2 IETR - Institut d'Électronique et des Technologies du numéRique

Scalable Video Coding was designed in response to the growing need for flexibility in video transmission over networks and channels. MPEG-4 Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is a recently finalized standard which introduces new coding tools such as spatial, temporal and quality scalability, to produce a layer-based scalable video stream. Additionally, inter-layer prediction allows a layer to use information from other layers as a basis for motion and texture prediction, improving the overall coding efficiency. Rate control is a capital issue in video coding, as it is designed to regulate the bitrate at the output of the encoder and keep it close to a specified constraint. Whereas rate control has been extensively studied for non-scalable video coding, only few propositions were made for scalable video coding. In this paper, we adapt an attractive rate control approach, based on a bitrate modeling framework called rho-domain, for scalable video coding. We show that this model performs well on all spatial, temporal and quality scalabilities, and handles inter-layer prediction quite accurately. After validating the approach in MPEG-4 SVC, we use the rho-domain model to build a simple-accurate rate control scheme. Results show that the mean frame bitrate error is below 7% on a representative set of configurations, while the impact on the complexity of the encoder is very low.

Domaines: Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]

Yohann Pitrey, Yann Serrand, Marie Babel, Olivier Déforges. Rho-Domain for low-complexity rate control on MPEG-4 Scalable Video Coding. IEEE ISM'08, Dec 2008, Berkeley, United States. pp.1-4. ⟨hal-00336056⟩