ZTE Communications ›› 2017, Vol. 15 ›› Issue (2): 55-65.DOI: 10.3969/j.issn.1673-5188.2017.02.008

• Research Paper • Previous Articles    

Variable Bit Rate Fuzzy Control for Low Delay Video Coding

ZHONG Min1, ZHOU Yimin1, LUO Minke1, ZUO Wen2   

  1. 1 School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China
    2 Audio and Video Technology Platform Department, ZTE Corporation, Shenzhen 518057, China
  • Received:2015-12-28 Online:2017-04-25 Published:2019-12-24
  • About author:ZHONG Min (754172961@qq.com) received the M.S. degree in computer science from the College of Computer Science, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in 2016. She is a test development engineer with Baidu Online Network Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd. She majored in image and video coding during the graduate study and keeps the research interest in video coding technology.|ZHOU Yimin (yiminzhou@uestc.edu.cn) received the B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the College of Computer Science, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) in 2003, 2006 and 2009 respectively. He joined the College of Computer Science, UESTC in 2009 and became an associate professor in 2012. His research interests include image and video coding, streaming and processing, and visual perception and applications. He has authored or co-authored over 30 papers in journals and conferences. He has three granted parents and over 10 patent applications. He pays special attention to the video encoding standards like HEVC, IVC and AVS. His two proposals were adopted to the MPEG and over 20 proposals adopted to the AVS.|LUO Minke (544751189@qq.com) received his B.S. degree from Southwest University of Science and Technology in 2013 and M.S degree from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in 2016, both in computer science. During the period of postgraduate, he followed professor ZHOU Yimin to study video coding and focused on bit rate control related research. His research interests include network video transmission, quality control, etc. He has authored or co-authored two journal papers and three patent applications. His five proposals have been adopted by the AVS group.|ZUO Wen (wenz0503@qq.com) received his master’s degree from Nanjing University, China in 2006. He worked with ZTE Corporation as a video system engineer. His current research interests include video encoding and application. He has authored or co-authored over 30 invention patents in his research area.
  • Supported by:
    This work is supported by ZTE Industry-Academia-Research Cooperation Funds under Grant(No. CON1503180004);the Postdoctoral Science Foundation of China under Gant(No. 2014M552342);the Foundation of Science and Technology Department of Sichuan Province, China under Grant(No. 2014GZ0005)

Abstract:

Rate control plays a critical role in achieving perceivable video quality under a variable bit rate, limited buffer sizes and low delay applications. Since a rate control system exhibits non-linear and unpredictable characteristics, it is difficult to establish a very accurate rate-distortion (R-D) model and acquire effective rate control performance. Considering the excellent control ability and low computing complexity of the fuzzy logic in non-linear systems, this paper proposes a bit-rate control algorithm based on a fuzzy controller, named the Fuzzy Rate Control Algorithm (FRCA), for All-Intra (AI) and low-delay (LD) video source coding. Contributions of the proposed FRCA mainly consist of four aspects. First, fuzzy logic is adopted to minimize the deviation between the actual and the target buffer size in the hypothetical reference decoder (HRD). Second, a fast lookup table is employed in fuzzy rate control, which reduces computing cost of the control process. Third, an input domain determination scheme is proposed to improve the precision of the fuzzy controller. Fourth, a novel scene change detection is introduced and integrated in the FRCA to adaptively adjust the Group-of-Pictures (GOP) length when the source content fluctuates. The FRCA can be transplanted and implemented in various industry coders. Extensive experiments show that the FRCA has accurate variable bit-rate control ability and maintains a steady buffer size during the encoding processes. Compared with the default configuration encoding under AI and LD, the proposed FRCA can achieve the target bit rates more accurately in various classical encoders.

Key words: rate control, video coding, fuzzy control, bit per pixel, rate-distortion model