LCU-Level Rate Control for HEVC Considering Hierarchical Coding Structure

In this paper, a method of rate control for constant bitrate (CBR) coding of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is addressed. The existing rate control of H.264/AVC may not provide exact rate control in the case of hierarchical coding structure since it doesn't consider the characteristics of the hierarchical coding structure. It is expected that a rate control is added to the reference software called HM for CBR encoding in the near future. More accurate rate control may be required in a hierarchical structure of random access (RA) mode defined in the common test condition of HM. In this paper, we propose a method of rate control based on quadratic Rate-Distortion (R-D) model considering temporal layers and frame types in hierarchical coding structure for efficient rate control. In the consideration of the trade-off relationship between the bit fluctuation and the average PSNR, both of frame and coding unit (CU) are set as the basic unit of rate control. The performance of the proposed rate control method is verified by simulations along with the trade-off relationships for the both cases of basic unit.