Abstract
H.264/AVC standard uses a variety of advanced signal processing/video coding techniques for broadcast quality video on half the bit rate required in MPEG-2. Despite being advanced, the current rate control algorithm of the standard does not exploit the fact that typical video sequences are composed of different shots. This paper argues that shot information can help us choose the size of the group of pictures (GOPs) more accurately, thus improving the performance of the rate control algorithm. We initially propose a novel MPEG-7 descriptor driven shot detection method with low computational cost for H.264/AVC. Then we exploit it to determine the initial quantization parameters for each shot based on modelling. These two steps can help us reduce the bit rate and PSNR fluctuation when video sequences have multiple shots. Our proposed scheme outperforms the rate control of the H.264/AVC significantly in terms of reducing the average bit rate fluctuation (variance) by 12.78–99.99% and the average PSNR fluctuation (variance) by 1.4–71% between shots. Experimental results also demonstrate that we can achieve similar or even better rate distortion (R-D) performance than the standard rate control algorithm. Our scheme is also applicable to computationally and memory restricted devices since it needs maximum two frames buffer space for MPEG-7 descriptor calculation, while the average amount of extra processing is only about 5.5% of the total CPU cycles.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Wiegand, T., Sullivan, G.J., Bjntegaard, G., Luthra, A.: Overview of the H.264/AVC video coding standard. IEEE Trans. CSVT 13(7) (2003)
Manjunath, B.S., Salembier, P., Sikora, T.: Introduction to MPEG-7: Multimedia Content Description Interface, Wiley, London (2002)
Manjunath, B.S., Ohm, J.R., Vasudevan, V.V., Yamada, A.: Color and Texture Descriptors. IEEE Trans. CSVT 11(6), 703–715 (2001)
Qiu, G.: Indexing chromatic and achromatic patterns for content-based color image retrieval. Pattern Recognit 35(8), 1675–1686 (2002). doi:10.1016/S0031-3203(01)00162-5
Won, C.S., Park, D.K., Park, S.J.: Efficient use of MPEG-7 edge histogram descriptor. ETRI J. 24(1) (2002)
V. Mody, “CVonline: Color Descriptors from Compressed Images,” Edinburgh University, UK (2007)
Martinez, J.M. (ed.): MPEG-7 Overview (version 10). ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11 (MPEG) document no. N6828 (2004)
Li, Z., et al.: Proposed draft of adaptive rate control, JVT-H017, 8th Meeting: Geneva (2003)
Li, Z.G., Pan, F., Lim, K.P., Feng, G., Lin, X., Rahardjia, S.: Adaptive basic unit layer rate control for JVT, Pattaya, Thailand, 2003, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11 AND ITU-T SG16 Q.6-G012
Eude, T., Grisel, R., Cherifi, H., Debrie, R.: On the distribution of the DCT coefficients. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, Signal Processing, vol. 5, April 1994, pp. 365–368
Smooth, S.R., Lowe, R.A.: Study of DCT coefficients distributions. In: Proc. SPIE. January 1996, pp. 365–368
Viterbi, A., Omura, J.: Principles of Digital Communication and Coding. McGraw-Hill Electrical Engineering Series, New York (1979)
Takagi, K., Takishima, Y., Nakajima, Y.: A study on rate distortion optimization scheme for JVT coder. In: Proc. SPIE, vol. 5150, pp. 914–923 (2003)
H.264/AVC Reference Software JM11.0. Available: http://iphome.hhi.de/suehring/tml/download/old_jm/
ITU-T and ISO/IEC JTC 1, Generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information. Part 2. Video. ITU-T Rec. H.262 and ISO/IEC 13818-2 (MPEG-2), Nov. 1994
ITU-T, Video coding for low bit rate communication, ITU-T Rec. H.263; v1: Nov. 1995, v2: Jan. 1998, v3: Nov. 2000
Kwon, D.K., Shen, M.Y., Kuo, C.-C.J.: Rate control for H264 video with enhanced rate and distortion models. IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. Video Technol. 17(5), 517–529 (2007)
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11, Coding of moving pictures and audio, MPEG 98/N2467, description of MPEG-7 content set
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Grecos, C., Yang, M. An improved rate control algorithm based on a novel shot detection scheme for the H.264/AVC standard. J Real-Time Image Proc 4, 91–106 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11554-008-0093-x
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11554-008-0093-x