A New H.264-Based Rate Control Algorithm for Stereoscopic Video Coding

According to investigating impact of complexity of stereoscopic frame pairs on stereoscopic video coding and transmission, a new rate control algorithm is presented. The proposed rate control algorithm is performed on three levels: stereoscopic group of pictures (SGOP) level, stereoscopic frame (SFrame) level and frame level. A temporal-spatial frame complexity model is firstly established, in the bits allocation stage, the frame complexity, position significance and reference property between the left and right frames are taken into account. Meanwhile, the target buffer is set according to the frame complexity. Experimental results show that the proposed method can efficiently control the bitrates, and it outperforms the fixed quantization parameter method from the rate distortion perspective, and average PSNR gain between rate-distortion curves (BDPSNR) is 0.21dB. Keywords—Stereoscopic video coding, rate control, stereoscopic group of pictures, complexity of stereoscopic frame pairs.