A Novel Rate Control Scheme for Constant Bit Rate Video Streaming

In this paper, a novel rate control mechanism is proposed for constant bit rate video streaming. The initial quantization parameter used for encoding a video sequence is determined using the average spatio-temporal complexity of the sequence, its resolution and the target bit rate. Simple linear estimation models are then used to predict the number of bits that would be necessary to encode a frame for a given complexity and quantization parameter. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed rate control mechanism significantly outperforms the existing rate control scheme in the Joint Model (JM) reference software in terms of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and consistent perceptual visual quality while achieving the target bit rate. Furthermore, the proposed scheme is validated through implementation on a miniature test-bed.