A rate control scheme using Kalman filtering for H.263

This paper proposes a rate control framework for H.263 video coding called the low-delay Kalman filtering rate controller (LKFrc), whose main part is the adaptive Kalman filter. In LKFrc, a low-delay two-stage selector is proposed to select the representative frames of video. The first stage can rapidly pre-select the relatively significant frames. The second selection stage is embedded in the prediction model of Kalman filter. By the prediction model, LKFrc can distribute a proper bit budget to the pre-selected frame or definitely skip this frame. The measurement model of Kalman filter exploits a rate-distortion (R-D) model to meet the given bit budget by selecting an appropriate picture-level quantization parameter (QP). From the picture-level QP, the subsequent macroblock-level QPs are rapidly yielded by a rapid offset model using the relative macroblock activity. In comparison with the TMN8 model, the LKFrc framework can obtain better PSNRs, higher motion continuities and lower flickering effects with lower computation cost.