Largest Coding Unit Level Rate Control Algorithm for Hierarchical Video Coding in HEVC

In the new video coding standard, called high efficiency video coding (HEVC), the coding unit (CU) is adopted as a basic unit of a coded block structure. Therefore, the rate control (RC) methods of H.264/AVC, whose basic unit is a macroblock, cannot be applied directly to HEVC. This paper proposes the largest CU (LCU) level RC method for hierarchical video coding in a HEVC. In the proposed method, the effective bit allocation is performed first based on the hierarchical structure, and the quantization parameters (QP) are then determined using the Cauchy density based rate-quantization (RQ) model. A novel method based on the linear rate model is introduced to estimate the parameters of the Cauchy density based RQ model precisely. The experimental results show that the proposed RC method not only controls the bitrate accurately, but also generates a constant number of bits per second with less degradation of the decoded picture quality than with the fixed QP coding and latest RC method for HEVC.