Constant Bitrate Control for a Distributed Video Coding System

In some distributed video coding (DVC) systems, the total bitrate depends mainly on the key frames (Intra coded) quality and on the side information accuracy. In this paper, a rate control (RC) mechanism is proposed to achieve and maintain a certain target bitrate for the overall Intra and WZ bitstream, mainly by adjusting online the Intra frames quality through the quantization parameter (QP). In order to obtain a similar decoded quality of Intra and WZ frames, the relevant parameters: QP for the key frames and the quantization index (QIndex) for WZ frames are controlled jointly. The major novelty of this work is a statistical model that expresses the relationship between QIndex and WZ frames bitrate. The proposed rate control solution is integrated into the VISNET2 WZ codec and the experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm to reach and maintain the target bitrate.