A new rate control algorithm for macroblock-level coders

Rate control plays an important role in video coding. It regulates the coded bits to satisfy the channel rate while keeping good video quality. In Tsai's paper, a new algorithm was proposed which rearranging the macroblocks' coding order according to their significance in each frame. More complex macroblocks will be coded with more priority in coding order. But it is required to rearrange the coding order and output the encoded bits in the original scan order. In this paper, a new rate control algorithm is proposed which recalculates the mquant of each macroblock inside a frame according to its significance. Furthermore, it can be applied to all macroblock-level coders. Simulation results show that this new algorithm can achieve obvious improvement in video quality like Tsai's algorithm while has lower complexity