Region-of-interest-based rate control scheme for high-efficiency video coding

This paper presents a novel rate control scheme designed for the newest high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard, and aimed at enhancing the quality of regions of interest (ROI) for a videoconferencing system. It is designed to consider the different regions at both frame level and coding tree unit (CTU) level. The proposed approach allocates a higher bit rate to the region of interest while keeping the global bit rate close to the assigned target value. The ROIs, typically faces in this application, are automatically detected and each CTU is classified in a region of interest map. This binary map is given as input to the rate control algorithm and the bit allocation is made accordingly. The algorithm is tested, first, using the initial version of the controller introduced in HEVC test model (HM.10), then, extended in HM.13. In this work, we first investigate the impact of differentiated bit allocation between the two regions using a fixed bit rate ratio in intra-coded frames (I-frames) and Bidirectionally predicted frames (B-frames). Then, unit quantization parameters (QPs) are computed independently for CTUs of different regions. The proposed approach has been compared to the reference controller implemented in HM and to a ROI-based rate control algorithm initially proposed for H.264 that we adopted to HEVC and implemented in HM.9. Experimental results show that our scheme has comparable performances with the ROI-based controller proposed for H.264. It achieves accurate target bit rates and provides an improvement in region of interest quality, both in objective metrics (up to 2 dB in PSNR) and based on subjective quality evaluation.