Optimal Bit Allocation for MPEG-4 Video Coding

In this paper, we propose an optimal bit allocation scheme for MPEG-4 video coding. In the proposed scheme, we assign more bits to I-frames and some selected P-frames. In order to decide optimal target bits for each intra frame, we need to calculate spatial complexity of the intra frame. We also define an absolute temporal correlation factor to measure temporal correlation between successive frames in the video sequence. Based on the temporal correlation factor, we can determine the position to insert a P-frame of high quality. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed rate control scheme has significantly reduced the frame skipping, while increasing the average PSNR value by up to 0.9dB for various test sequences.