A novel H.264 rate control algorithm with consideration of visual attention

Abstract

In video coding, a well-designed rate control scheme should be concerned with both the objective and subjective quality. However, the existing H.264 rate control algorithms mainly aim at improving the objective quality without considering the human visual system. In this paper, we propose a novel rate control algorithm that takes into account visual attention. In a group of pictures, bits allocated to each frame are related to the local motion attention in it, and more bits are allocated to the frames with strong local motion attention. Similarly, in each frame, more bits are assigned to visually significant macroblocks (MBs), and fewer to visually insignificant MBs. Experiment results show that the proposed algorithm improves the coding quality in frames with strong local motion, and reduces PSNR fluctuation across frames by up to 22.15%. In addition, PSNR in visually important regions is increased by up to 1.45 dB as compared to the standard H.264 rate control scheme that improves the subjective quality. Increased computation complexity of the proposed algorithm is less than 4%, which is negligible.