Adaptive rate control algorithm for low power video coding systems

With the recent development of third-generation communication technologies, low power video coding system (such as PDA, Handphone or system on chip) has found wide applications such as live video using a PDA and sharing it among friends, etc. However, video coding in a low power system has two major hurdles to overcome: (1) In a low power system, video coding needs to meet the rigorous constraints of the available memory and computational capacity; (2) In a low power system, the computational power allocated to video coding may vary drastically (in bursts). In this paper, a new adaptive rate control algorithm is proposed for low power video coding system. This adaptive rate control scheme takes into account the time constraint of a low power system, and its bit allocation depends not only on the available data bits, but more importantly, on the available coding time. Experimental results show that, compared to the existing rate control scheme, the new algorithm can always achieve the maximum frame rate, maximize the utilization of the available bandwidth and computing power, increase the average PSNR, and improve the subjective perceptual quality of the reconstructed video.