Global Rate-Distortion Optimization-Based Rate Control for HEVC HDR Coding

High dynamic range (HDR) video compression technology, which is capable of delivering a wider range of luminance and a larger colour gamut than standard dynamic range (SDR) technology, has been widely used in recent years in many fields, including industrial image processing, digital entertainment, and machine vision. Rate control (RC) is of paramount importance to HDR compression and transmission; accordingly, an RC scheme for HDR in High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is proposed in this paper. First, considering the HDR characteristics, we propose an HDR-Visual Difference Predictor (VDP)-2-based rate-distortion (R-D) model to improve the coding performance. Second, we directly utilize lambda rather than the bit rate in the optimization process to obtain the optimal solution. Finally, we propose a new model parameter estimation method to further reduce the RC errors. According to our experimental results, significant bit rate reductions in terms of HDR-VDP-2, the Video Quality Metric (VQM) and the mean peak-signal-to-noise ratio (mPSNR) can be achieved on average compared with the state-of-the-art algorithm used in HM16.19.