Scalable High Efficiency Video Coding (SHVC) is the scalable extension of the latest video coding standard H.265/HEVC. Video rate control algorithm is out of the scope of video coding standards. Appropriate rate control algorithms are designed for various applications t More
Scalable High Efficiency Video Coding (SHVC) is the scalable extension of the latest video coding standard H.265/HEVC. Video rate control algorithm is out of the scope of video coding standards. Appropriate rate control algorithms are designed for various applications to overcome practical constraints such as bandwidth and buffering constraints. In most of the scalable video applications, such as video on demand (VoD) and broadcasting applications, encoded bitstreams with variable bit rates are preferred to bitstreams with constant bit rates. In variable bit rate (VBR) applications, the tolerable delay is relatively high. Therefore, we utilize a larger buffer to allow more variations in bitrate to provide smooth and high visual quality of output video. In this paper, we propose a fuzzy video rate controller appropriate for VBR applications of SHVC. A fuzzy controller is used for each layer of scalable video to minimize the fluctuation of QP at the frame level while the buffering constraint is obeyed for any number of layers received by a decoder. The proposed rate controller utilizes the well-known structural similarity index (SSIM) as a quality metric to increase the visual quality of the output video. The proposed rate control algorithm is implemented in HEVC reference software and comprehensive experiments are executed to tune the fuzzy controllers and also to evaluate the performance of the algorithm. Experimental results show a high performance for the proposed algorithm in terms of rate control, visual quality, and rate-distortion performance.
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