Consistent Quality Oriented Rate Control in HEVC Via Balancing Intra and Inter Frame Coding

Consistent quality oriented rate control (RC) in video coding has attracted much more attention. However, the existing efforts only focus on decreasing variations between every two adjacent frames, but neglect coding tradeoff problem between intraframes and interframes. In this article, we deal with it from a new perspective, where intraframe quantization parameter (IQP) and RC are optimized for balanced coding. First, due to the importance of intraframes, a new framework is proposed for consistent quality oriented IQP prediction, and then we remove unqualified IQP candidates using the proposed penalty term. Second, we extensively evaluate possible features, and select target bits per pixel for all remaining frames, average and standard variance of frame QPs, where equivalent acquisition methods for QP features are given. Third, predicted IQPs are clipped effectively according to bandwidth and previous information for better bit rate accuracy. Compared with high efficiency video coding reference baseline, experiments demonstrate that our method reduces quality fluctuation greatly by 37.2% on frame-level standard variance of peak-signal-noise-ratio and 45.1% on that of structural similarity. Moreover, it also can have satisfactory results on rate-distortion performance, bit accuracy and buffer control.