Abstract: This paper proposes a rate control scheme on the level of coding tree unit (CTU) based on the Laplace distribution modeling of the transformed residuals for high efficiency video coding (HEVC). At first the relationship between the optimal quantization parameter, the Laplace parameter and the Lagrange multiplier is established. Based on this relationship, the quantization parameter for each CTU is dynamically adjusted according to its distribution properties of the transformed residual to achieve high coding performance. Moreover,this paper incorporates this scheme within a rate control algorithm on the frame level to produce accurate rate control as well as high coding performance. Experimental results show that the proposed rate control scheme achieves accurate control as well as better coding performance than both the rate control schemes in the HEVC proposals JCTVC-H0213 and JCTVC-K0103.

Key words: high efficiency video coding (HEVC), Laplace distribution, rate control