Region-based rate control for 3D-HEVC based texture video coding

Bit starvation resulted from inefficient rate control of 3D video coding deteriorates visual quality of synthesized views. Most region based rate control schemes allocate higher bitrate to regions of interest (ROIs), but bits may be still consumed by early coded units. This paper avoids reducing coding bits in high-cost regions of 3D-HEVC. Instead of ROIs that are determined by humans, high-cost regions sensitive to bit starvation are detected. Region-level bit allocation is achieved by curve fitting of coding statistics, and recursive Taylor expansion (RTE) based bit allocation is adopted to optimally estimates the target bitrate and the QP related λ of LCUs in each region. Based on retained earnings in economics, bits are reserved for LCUs that are sensitive to distortions. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme outperforms both the R-λ model and RTE model in bitrate accuracy with similar R-D performance.