A Rate Control Algorithm for HEVC Considering Visual Saliency

In this paper, visual saliency is used to guide the coding tree unit (CTU) level bit allocation process in high efficiency video coding (HEVC) to improve the visual quality. At first, a saliency detection algorithm is proposed. With the detected saliency map, the distortion of each CTU is weighted by the corresponding saliency, so that the distortion of the salient areas is more critical. Then, the optimal bit allocation problem constraint by the picture level target bits and minimum quality fluctuation is built. Numerical method is used to solve the bit allocation problem. Experiment results show that quality gaining in salient areas is up to 0.8658 dB, the gaining of saliency weighted PSNR is up to 1.0318 dB.