Scene-level two-pass video rate controller for H.265/HEVC standard

Abstract

A scene-level two-pass video rate controller for high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard is proposed in this paper. The proposed rate controller is suitable for many pre-recorded applications in which encoded videos are transferred later on through a communication channel with limited bandwidth and buffering constraint. This rate controller operates in two passes. In the first pass, the video sequence is compressed and relevant information is collected. In the second pass, an optimal base quantization parameter (QP) for each video scene is calculated by simplifying the λ-domain rate-distortion model. Then, using the optimal base QP and the known QP cascading technique, a QP is computed for each picture in the scene. In this way, the quality of the compressed video is kept relatively constant during a scene and thus it provides a high-level perceptual quality for the compressed video. The base QP may be slightly modified during the second pass encoding by a fuzzy controller according to the second pass encoding results and the buffer status. The proposed rate controller has been implemented on H.265/HEVC standard reference software. Experimental results show that in comparison with the constant QP encoding and three known rate control algorithms the proposed algorithm provides a high-level quality for tested video sequences while the required buffering delay is low and the available bandwidth is fully used.