A Novel Two Pass Rate Control Scheme for Variable Bit Rate Video Streaming

Abstract

In this paper, a novel two-pass rate control scheme is proposed to achieve a consistent visual quality media for variable bit rate (VBR) video streaming. The rate-distortion (RD) characteristics of each frame is used to establish a frame complexity model, which is later used along with statistics collected in the first-pass to derive an optimal quantization parameter for encoding the frame in the second-pass. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed rate control scheme significantly outperforms the existing rate control mechanism in the Joint Model (JM) reference software in terms of the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and consistent perceptual visual quality while achieving the target bit rate. Further, the proposed scheme is validated through implementation on a miniature test-bed.