An Efficient Rate Control Scheme for Video Compression in Low-latency Interoperable Interfaces

Huiwen Ren, Zetian Song, Yan Wang, Yucheng Sun, Shanshe Wang, Fangdong Chen, Li Wang, Shiliang Pu, Siwei Ma, Wen Gao

Abstract: Lightweight video compression has effectively alleviated the tension between growing transmission demands and expensive integration upgrades. Effective rate control algorithms are believed to be the crucial bottleneck for quality improvement during those ultra-high throughput coding processes. This paper proposes a novel rate control (RC) scheme that constructs a contextual adaptive bit estimation model through clustering historical compression information into block-gradient complexity categories. A buffer-aware tuning method and a flexible quantization parameter (QP) mapping algorithm are designed to determine the Luma/Chroma QP distribution where a simplified Lagrangian multiplier is further defined to preserve the stability of the overall compression process. As a result, the constant-bitrate compression towards low-latency interoperable ASICs is implemented with a promising RC performance.