Rate-distortion optimization of rate control for H.264 with adaptive initial quantization parameter determination

A rate-distortion (R-D) optimization rate control (RC) algorithm with adaptive Q(p) initialization is presented for H.264. First, a linear distortion-quantization (D-Q) model is introduce and thus a close-form solution is developed to derive optimal quantization parameters (Q(p)) for encoding each macroblock. Then we exploit to determine the initial Q(p) efficiently and adaptively according to the content of video sequences. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve better R-D performance than that of other two RC algorithms including the algorithm JVT-G012 which is the current recommended RC scheme implemented in the H.264 reference software JM9.5.