# Region-Based Rate-Control for H.264/AVC for Low Bit-Rate Applications

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.00121 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.00121/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 28 Feb 2015.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Region of Interest (ROI) based adaptive cross-layer system for real-time video streaming over Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02656/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Rate-control plays an important role in video coding. However, in the conventional rate-control algorithms, the number and position of Macroblocks (MBs) inside one basic unit for rate-control is inflexible and predetermined. The different characteristics of the MBs are not fully considered. Also, there is no overall optimization of the coding of basic units. This paper proposes a new region-based rate-control scheme for H.264/AVC to improve the coding efficiency. The inter-frame information is explored to objectively divide one frame into multiple regions based on their rate-distortion behaviors. The MBs with the similar characteristics are classified into the same region, and the entire region instead of a single MB or a group of contiguous MBs is treated as a basic unit for rate-control. A linear rate-quantization stepsize model and a linear distortion-quantization stepsize model are proposed to accurately describe the rate-distortion characteristics for the region-based basic units. Moreover, based on the above linear models, an overall optimization model is proposed to obtain suitable Quantization Parameters (QPs) for the region-based basic units. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed region-based rate-control approach can achieve both better subjective and objective quality by performing the rate-control adaptively with the content, compared to the conventional rate-control approaches.