Rate Control Based on Intermediate Description

Video adaptation has been proved to be an efficient technique in dealing with various constraints such as bandwidth limitation and user requirement in multimedia applications. However, existing methods including Scalable Video Coding and transcoding cannot get a fine performance when bandwidth constraints exist in various scenarios particularly in real-time applications. In this paper, we propose a novel rate control scheme based on intermediate description. The proposed scheme can provide fast rate control for narrow and time-varying transmission channel in scenarios such as video streaming, video sharing and video on demand. In this scheme, Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients distribution is modeled by generalized Gaussian distribution, meanwhile the parameter information of this model is stored as side information for rate control. With the stored parameter information, encoder and transcoder can achieve the target bit-rate with low complexity. Furthermore, an initial Quantization Parameter (QP) determination method is also presented to calculate a proper QP for the Instantaneous Decoding Refresh (IDR) picture. Experimental results show that compared with JVT-G012 in H.264, the proposed rate control scheme can save more than 85% encoding time and obtain the required bit-rate more precisely, meanwhile gains a performance improvement by 0.2dB averagely.