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