$\lambda$-Domain Rate Control Algorithm for HEVC Scalable Extension

In this paper, we propose a λ-domain rate control algorithm for high efficiency video coding (HEVC) scalable extension. All the commonly used scalabilities including temporal, spatial, and quality scalability are taken into consideration. The proposed algorithm mainly has three key contributions. First, we propose an optimal initial target bits and initial encoding parameters determination algorithm for the first frame of each layer to achieve the best rate-distortion (R-D) performance. Second, an optimal bit allocation algorithm taking both the intra and inter layer dependence into consideration is proposed for the inter frames under spatial and quality scalability cases. Third, since the coding scheme of HEVC scalable extension with multiple layers is even more flexible than HEVC, an adaptive updating algorithm for R-λ model is proposed to control the bits per frame even more precisely. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed λ-domain rate control algorithm can bring both more precise bitrate accuracy and better R-D performance compared with the previous rate control algorithms for HEVC scalable extension.