Perceptual sensitivity-based rate control method for high efficiency video coding

Huanqiang Zeng, Aisheng Yang, King Ngi Ngan, Miaohui Wang

Abstract: The newest video coding standard--high efficiency video coding (HEVC) optimizes its coding efficiency in terms of sum of square error (SSE), which does not fully consider the perceptual characteristic of the input video. Thus, the HEVC is not effective in the sense of perceptual video coding. To address this problem, an efficient perceptual sensitivity-based rate control (PSRC) method for HEVC is proposed based on the human visual system (HVS) observation that the region with less perceptual sensitivity can tolerate more distortion. In the first stage, the proposed method develops a perceptual sensitivity measurement to evaluate the perceptual sensitivity of each coding tree unit (CTU) and each frame, which is then used to guide the bit allocation so that more bits will be allocated to those regions with higher perceptual sensitivity. To meet the target bits, an improved R-λ model is utilized to determine the quantization parameter (QP). Experimental results have shown that the proposed method is able to improve the perceptual coding performance, compared with the original rate control in HEVC.