Efficient frame-by-frame QP assignment method for Internet video coding

In this paper, an efficient quantization parameter (QP) assignment method is proposed for MPEG internet video coding (IVC). QP is one critical control point in video compression performance. Instead of assigning the same QP value for each frame, the allocation of different QP values can increase the coding efficiency of standardized video codecs such as AVC/H.264 and HEVC along with the special group of structure (GOP) of those codecs. However, it has not been thoroughly investigated in general IPPP coding structure whether the QP variation is clearly effective or not. Thus, an efficient QP assignment method that assigns QP values frame-by-frame is proposed for the general IPPP coding structure. The proposed method exploits the advantages of hierarchical QP variation frame-by-frame. Extensive experiments were conducted to figure out how much QP variation improves coding performance upon internet video coding (IVC) encoder that has the general IPPP coding structure and is recently being developed by MPEG experts. As a result, the proposed method significantly increased the coding efficiency compared to the existing IVC test model 10.0, showing a 9.9% gain on average in terms of BD-rate.