Rate control of H.264/AVC scalable extension

This paper presents a rate control scheme for H.264/AVC scalable extension. Based on our previous work on H.264/AVC rate control, a switched model is proposed to predict the mean absolute difference (MAD) of the residual texture from the available MAD information of the previous frame in the same layer and the same frame in its "base layer." Thus, abrupt MAD fluctuations could be predicted properly in the enhancement layer. Moreover, a bit allocation scheme is proposed for the hierarchical B-frames structure by taking into consideration the relative importance of each frame. With our algorithm, the rate control for all the coarse-grain-scalability, spatial, temporal and combined enhancement layer could be realized, and the target bit rate for each layer can be achieved. Our method encodes the sequence only once and the buffer is well controlled to prevent it from overflowing and underflowing.