• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.46 no.4
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• pp.50-57
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• 2009

This paper presents a new model-based macroblock layer rate control algorithm for low bit rate video coding which generates output bits corresponding to a target bit budget. The H.264 standard uses various coding modes and optimization methods to improve the compression performance, which makes it difficult to control the generated traffic accurately in low bit rate environments. In the proposed scheme, we first estimate MAD values of macroblocks in a frame and define a target remaining bits using the estimated MAD values before encoding each macroblock. If a difference between the target value and the actual value is greater than a threshold value, the quantization parameter is adjusted to decrease the difference. It is shown by experimental results that the new algorithm can obtain more than 66% decrease of the difference between the target bits and the resulting bits for a frame with the PSNR performance better than that of the existing rate control algorithm.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.24 no.9B
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• pp.1755-1766
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• 1999

A region-based video codec based on the H.263+ standard is examined and its associated novel rate control scheme is proposed in this work. The region-based coding scheme is a hybrid method that consists of the traditional block DCT coding and the object-based coding. Basically, we adopt H.263+ as the platform, and develop a fast macroblock-based segmentation method to implement the region-based video codec. The proposed rate control solution includes rate control in three levels: encoding frame selection, frame-layer rate control and macroblock-layer rate control. The goal is to enhance the visual quality of decoded frames at low bit rates. The efficiency of proposed rate control scheme applied to the region-based video codes is demonstrated via several typical test sequences.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.14 no.5
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• pp.1193-1200
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• 2010

This paper presents a new adaptive macroblock quantization algorithm which generates the output bits corresponding to the target bit budget. The H.264 standard uses various coding modes and optimization methods to improve the compression performance, which makes it difficult to control the amount of the generated traffic accurately. In the proposed scheme, linear regression analysis is used to analyze the relationship between the bit rate of each macroblock and the quantization parameter and to predict the MAD values. Using the predicted values, the quantization parameter of each macroblock is determined by the Lagrange multiplier method and then modified according to the difference between the bit budget and the generated bits. It is shown by experimental results that the new algorithm can generate output bits accurately corresponding to the target bit rates.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.34 no.2C
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• pp.200-208
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• 2009

A macroblock layer rate control for H.264/AVC has the problem that allocated target bits for current frame occasionally are exhausted too fast due to inadequate quantization parameter assignment. In this case, the maximum permissible quantization parameter is used to encode for remaining macroblocks and it leads to degradation of the visual quality. In addition, the header bits length estimation algorithm used for quantization parameter assignment takes the average header bits length for the encoded macroblocks of the previous frame and the current frame. Therefore, it generates a big mismatch between the actually generated header bits length and the estimated header bits length. In this paper, we propose adaptive quantization parameter decision method to prevent early exhausting target bits during encoding the current frame by considering the number of macroblocks that have negative targets bits in previous frame and the improved header bits length estimation scheme for accurate quantization parameter decision.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.32 no.9C
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• pp.849-860
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• 2007

Because the H.264/AVC standard adopts the variable length coding algorithm, the rate of encoded video bitstream fluctuates a lot as time flows, though its compression efficiency is superior to that of existing standards. When a video is transmitted in real-time over networks with fixed low-bandwidth, it is necessary to control the bit rate which is generated from encoder. Many existing rate control algorithms have been adopting the quadratic rate-distortion model which determines the target bits for each frame. We propose a new rate control algorithm for H.264/AVC video transmission over networks with fixed bandwidth. The proposed algorithm predicts quantization parameter adaptively to reduce video distortion using the quadratic rate-distortion model, which uses the target bit rate and the mean absolute difference for current frame considering pixel difference between macroblocks in the previous and the current frame. On video samples with high motion and scene change cases, experimental results show that (1) the proposed algorithm adapts the encoded bitstream to limited channel capacity, while existing algorithms abruptly excess the limit bit rate; (2) the proposed algorithm improves picture quality with $0.4{\sim}0.9dB$ in average.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.42 no.6
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• pp.63-72
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• 2005

In this paper, we propose the bit-rate control algorithm for the block based image compression like H.263, H.263+ or MPEG-4. The proposed algorithm is designed to identify the quantization parameter set through the Lagrangian optimization technique based on the well-known linear source model. We set the Lagrangian cost function with the rates and distortion calculated from the linear source model. We calculate the quantization parameter set using the Vitervi algorithm to solve the Lagrangian optimization problem considering the Dquant method of H.263 and MPEG-4. The proposed algorithm improves the video quality by up to 1.5 dB compared with the TMN8 scheme, and is more effective in the video sources with dynamic activities than the consistent quality approaches.