The current high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard is developed to achieve greatly improved compression performance compared with the previous coding standard H.264/AVC. It adopts a quadtree based picture partition structure to flexibility signal various texture characteristics of images. However, this results in a dramatic increase in computational complexity, which obstructs HEVC in real-time application. To alleviate this problem, we propose a fast coding unit (CU) size decision algorithm in HEVC intra coding based on consideration of the depth level of neighboring CUs, distribution of rate distortion (RD) value and distribution of residual data. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve up to 60% time reduction with negligible RD performance loss.

Although HEVC rate control can achieve high coding efficiency, it still does not fully utilize the special characteristics of surveillance videos, which typically have a moving foreground and relatively static background. For surveillance videos, it is usually necessary to provide a better coding quality of the moving foreground. In this paper, a foreground-background CTU λ separate decision scheme is proposed. First, low-complexity pixel-based segmentation is presented to obtain the foreground and the background. Second, the rate distortion (RD) characteristics of the foreground and the background are explored. With the rate distortion optimization (RDO) process, the average CTU λ value of the foreground or the background should be equal to the frame λ. Then, a separate optimal CTU λ decision is proposed with a separate λ clipping method. Finally, a separate updating process is used to obtain reasonable parameters for the foreground and the background. The experimental results show that the quality of the foreground is improved by 0.30 dB in the random access configuration and 0.45 dB in the low delay configuration without degradation of either the rate control accuracy or whole frame quality.

Recent deep-learning-based video compression models have demonstrated superior performance over traditional codecs. However, few studies have focused on deep learning rate control. In this paper, end-to-end rate control is proposed for deep contextual video compression (DCVC). With the designed two-branch residual-based network, the optimal bit rate ratio is predicted according to the feature correlation of the adjacent frames. Then, the bit rate can be reasonably allocated for every frame by satisfying the temporal feature. To minimize the rate distortion (RD) cost, the optimal λ of the current frame can be obtained from a two-branch regression-based network using the temporal encoded information. The experimental results show that the achievable BD-rate (PSNR) and BD-rate (SSIM) of the proposed algorithm are -0.84% and -0.35%, respectively, with 2.25% rate control accuracy.

Since HEVC intra rate control has no prior information to rely on for coding, it is a difficult work to obtain the optimal λ for every coding tree unit (CTU). In this paper, a convolutional neural network (CNN) based intra rate control is proposed. Firstly, a CNN with two last output channels is used to predict the key parameters of the CTU R-λ curve. For well training the CNN, a combining loss function is built and the balance factor γ is explored to achieve the minimum loss result. Secondly, the initial CTU λ can be calculated by the predicted results of the CNN and the allocated bit per pixel (bpp). According to the rate distortion optimization (RDO) of a frame, a spatial equation is derived between the CTU λ and the frame λ. Lastly, The CTU clipping function is used to obtain the optimal CTU λ for the intra rate control. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm improves the intra rate control performance significantly with a good rate control accuracy.