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 its 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 Bjntegaard, 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
[5] Khalid Sayood, Introduction to Data Compression, Morgan Kaufmann,
third edition, 2006
[6] Gary J. Sullivan and Thomas Wiegand, Rate distortion optimization for
Video Compression, IEEE Signal Processing magazine, November 1998
[7] Loren Merritt et al., X264: A high performance H.264/AVC encoder,
http://neuron2.net/library/avc/overview_x264_v8_5.pdf
[8] Yoo-Sok Saw, Rate-Quality optimized video coding, Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1999
[9] A. Ortega and K. Ramchandran, Rate-distortion methods for image and
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


[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

[13] Koichi Takagi, Yasuhiro Takishima and Yasuyuki Nakajima, A study on Rate distortion
optimization scheme for JVT encoder, Proceedings of SPIE, Visual Communications 2003.

[14] Gary J. Sullivan, Pankaj Topiwala, and Ajay Luthra, The H.264/AVC Advanced Video Coding
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.

[16] Jerry D. Gibson, Rich Baker, Richard L. Baker, Toby Berger, Tom Lookabaugh, Digital
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
References