A novel rate control method for H.264

This paper presents a single-pass bit allocation and rate control method for H.264. We first present an R-Q model which can estimate the frame codingcomplexity before macroblock mode selection. Based on our R-Q model, a single-pass slice layer rate control scheme is developed, including bit allocation of the frame layer and the slice layer. At last, to enhance our rate control scheme with greater accuracy, we propose a fine rate control method based on mode selection by optimizing the Lagrange multiplier. The experiments show that compared to JVT-E069 and JVT-G012 proposed to JVT (Joint Video Coding Expert Group), our methodcan control the bit rate more accurately and obtain a higher PSNR. When the three schemes applied to the sequence with scene changes the PSNR of this paper is improved by 0.2～0.4dB.