A content-based rate control algorithm for screen content video coding

Abstract

The popularity of 3D screen content videos like 3D animations calls for better coding performance of screen content videos. The exiting R-λ rate control model is designed to enable the coding performance of conventional nature videos, which can not accurately describe the Rate-Distortion (R-D) relationships of the screen content videos, especially for videos containing limited colors and sharper edges. This paper proposes a new rate control (RC) scheme which takes the divergent characteristics of text contents, screen images and nature images in screen content videos into consideration. In particular, the content-based rate control algorithm is developed at Coding Tree Unit (CTU) level, where CTUs are divided into three categories including Text-CTUs (T-CTUs), Screen Image-CTUs (SI-CTUs) and Nature Image-CTUs (NI-CTUs). Three R-λ models reflecting different R-D relationships of different CTUs are established, and the model parameters are updated on the basis of their own models. Furthermore, in view of the fact that continuity and mutability simultaneously exist in screen content videos, two bit allocation schemes for regions containing only one content are determined in this paper. Experimental results show that the proposed RC scheme achieves 0.749 dB BDPSNR increase under the Low Delay configuration and 0.637 dB BDPSNR increase under the Random Access configuration on average, compared to the default R-λ model in HEVC Screen Content Coding extension (HEVC-SCC) reference software.