Novel target bit rate estimation for improved frame level H.264 rate control

An improved rate control scheme with better buffer level tracking and more accurate target bits prediction for H.264 video encoding, is proposed in this work. Compared to the existing H.264 rate control scheme, our scheme gives better buffer regulation with improved PSNR for frame level rate control. The bits required for encoding header information account for a significantly high percentage of the total bits, especially at lower bit rate. The proposed prediction scheme, estimates the number of header and texture bits by using statistics from INTER16×16 mode decision process. The estimated bits are then used for modifying the Quantization Parameter (QP) for better target matching. The experimental results show that the proposed improvement in rate control algorithm significantly reduces the difference in actual and target buffer level while improving the quality of encoded video sequences.