Quantizer Control for H.264/AVC Streaming Over Networks

Abstract

H.264/AVC is the newest international video coding standard, intended for a broad variety of applications. Similar to former video standards such as H.261, MPEG-i, MPEG-2, H.263, and MPEG-4, H.264/AVC is based on a block-based hybrid coding framework. The number of bits and distortion for each image block is controlled by that block’s quantization parameter. Rate control is used to select the quantization parameters so that the encoder produces bits under the channel bandwidth and buffer constraints while pursuing high video quality. This paper presents a novel quantizer controlling method to further adjust the computed quantization parameter (QP). Simulation results show that the H.264 coder, using the proposed method, can achieve lower relative control error and better visual quality and PSNR performance than the existing H.264 rate control method (JVT_G012).