Bit-rate control method and apparatus for normalizing visual quality

摘要

A scalable video codec includes an encoder that encodes an original moving picture; a rate control unit that allocates an optimal amount of bits for each coding unit based on a bit-rate desired by a user; a pre-decoder that receives a bit-stream and extracts a bit-stream having an appropriate amount of bits; and a decoder that decodes image sequences of the moving picture from the extracted bit-stream, so as to reconstruct the original moving picture. In particular, the present invention focuses on the operation performed in the rate control unit 340 . The rate control unit operates a definition step of a bit-rate function available for use in the predecoder, a pre-summation step to thereby obtain the uniform visual quality, an approximation to determine the distortion function, and a normalization step to allow the total allocated bit-rates to be equal to a target bit-rate.