Sequence level video quality smoothing and rate control for real-time video recording

In this work, we introduce the concept of low-pass filtering of rate-distortion (R-D) functions and develop a one-pass encoding with smoothed rate control (SRC) which is able to maximize the video presentation quality, especially the temporal perceptual quality smoothness, in real-time video recording applications. In addition, theoretically, we prove that SRC is able to achieve the target bit budget determined by the storage space or network bandwidth. Without look ahead and pre-processing, the one-pass SRC algorithm has a similar performance as the offline two-pass encoding with optimum bit allocation. Our extensive simulation results demonstrate that SRC significantly reduces picture quality fluctuation and motion jerkiness, and improves the perceptual video presentation quality.