Macroblock Layer Rate Control Based on Structural Similarity and Mean Absolute Difference for H.264

Abstract EN

In the process of the H.264 video coding, special attention should be paid to the subjective quality of the image.

This paper applies the structural similarity (SSIM) based subjective evaluation to the rate control in the H.264 coding and proposes to combine the SSIM and the mean absolute difference (MAD) to perform the macroblock layer bit allocation instead of the MAD.

Experimental results show that the proposed method is correlating better with the human visual system and thus achieves better subjective image quality.