A Frame-Level Rate Control Scheme for Low Delay Video Coding in HEVC

R-lambda rate control scheme is recommended in the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, which shows high accuracy of bit rate control but lower rate distortion performance. In order to minimize the distortion subject to a target bit rate, a lambda domain frame-level rate control scheme for low delay coding of HEVC was proposed. Firstly, an improved parameter updating method is presented for the frame level rate distortion model, which full uses the information of encoded frames in the previous group of pictures (GOP). Then, an adaptive dynamic frame level bit allocation scheme is proposed by employing global rate distortion optimization theory. Finally, to further improve the coding efficiency, the bits allocation adjustment is made for the first several GOPs in video sequence according to the rate distortion dependency. The experimental results show that the proposed method can greatly improve the rate distortion performance under the condition of high accuracy of bit rate control.