A Trellis Based Temporal Rate Allocation and Virtual Reference Frames for High Efficiency Video Coding

The High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard has now become the most popular video coding solution for video conferencing, broadcasting, and streaming. However, its compression performance is still a critical issue for adopting a large number of emerging video applications with higher spatial and temporal resolutions. To advance the current HEVC performance, we propose an efficient temporal rate allocation solution. The proposed method adaptively allocates the compression bitrate for each coded picture in a group of pictures by using a trellis-based dynamic programming approach. To achieve this task, we trained the trellis-based quantization parameter for each frame in a group of pictures considering the temporal layer position. We further improved coding efficiency by incorporating our proposed framework with other inter prediction methods such as a virtual reference frame. Experiments showed around 2% and 5% bitrate savings with our trellis-based rate allocation method with and without a virtual reference frame compared to the conventional HEVC standard, respectively.