APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing > Vol 3 > Issue 1

Region-of-interest-based rate control scheme for high-efficiency video coding

Marwa Meddeb, Institut Mines-Télécom, France, Marco Cagnazzo, Institut Mines-Télécom, France, cagnazzo@telecom-paristech.fr , Béatrice Pesquet-Popescu, Institut Mines-Télécom, France
 
Suggested Citation
Marwa Meddeb, Marco Cagnazzo and BĂ©atrice Pesquet-Popescu (2014), "Region-of-interest-based rate control scheme for high-efficiency video coding", APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing: Vol. 3: No. 1, e16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/ATSIP.2014.15

Publication Date: 17 Dec 2014
© 2014 Marwa Meddeb, Marco Cagnazzo and Béatrice Pesquet-Popescu
 
Subjects
 
Keywords
HEVCBit allocationRate controlRate-quantization modelROI coding
 

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This is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence.

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In this article:
I. INTRODUCTION 
II. RELATED WORKS 
III. RATE CONTROL FOR HEVC 
IV. PROPOSED APPROACH 
V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 
VI. CONCLUSION 

Abstract

This paper presents a novel rate control scheme designed for the newest high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard, and aimed at enhancing the quality of regions of interest (ROI) for a videoconferencing system. It is designed to consider the different regions at both frame level and coding tree unit (CTU) level. The proposed approach allocates a higher bit rate to the region of interest while keeping the global bit rate close to the assigned target value. The ROIs, typically faces in this application, are automatically detected and each CTU is classified in a region of interest map. This binary map is given as input to the rate control algorithm and the bit allocation is made accordingly. The algorithm is tested, first, using the initial version of the controller introduced in HEVC test model (HM.10), then, extended in HM.13. In this work, we first investigate the impact of differentiated bit allocation between the two regions using a fixed bit rate ratio in intra-coded frames (I-frames) and Bidirectionally predicted frames (B-frames). Then, unit quantization parameters (QPs) are computed independently for CTUs of different regions. The proposed approach has been compared to the reference controller implemented in HM and to a ROI-based rate control algorithm initially proposed for H.264 that we adopted to HEVC and implemented in HM.9. Experimental results show that our scheme has comparable performances with the ROI-based controller proposed for H.264. It achieves accurate target bit rates and provides an improvement in region of interest quality, both in objective metrics (up to 2 dB in PSNR) and based on subjective quality evaluation.

DOI:10.1017/ATSIP.2014.15