Efficient rate control for intra-frame coding in high efficiency video coding

In this paper, a coding tree unit (CTU)-level rate control (RC) scheme is proposed for intra-frame coding in the high efficiency video coding (HEVC). The CTU-level target bits are allocated based on the content complexity and the parameters of the Cauchy-based rate-quantization (R-Q) model of the current CTU is estimated according to the neighboring previously encoded CTUs. The proposed RC does not exploit any information of the adjacent frames such that it can inherently handle the initial frame and the scene change frames. The experimental results demonstrate the accurate rate estimation and stable video quality of the proposed RC scheme.