Bit rate control method and apparatus for MPEG-4 video coding

A bit rate control apparatus comprising:

• a pre-encoding unit for receiving a video stream and initializing a buffer required for coding:
• an encoding unit for inter-coding and intra-coding the received video stream;
• a post-encoding unit for updating the buffer based on the coded video data and adjusting a bit rate by controlling frame-skip;
• a time instant update unit for receiving a next frame;
• and
• a determination unit for determining whether or not the received frame is a first video object plane;
• wherein the post-encoding unit comprises:
• a rate distortion update unit for updating the rate distortion buffer in which an encoded bitstream to be transmitted to the decoder is stored;
• a back propagation update control unit for performing back propagation model update control;
• a self-organizing control unit for organizing a network and updating the rate distortion buffer based on the coding result;
• and
• a post-frame skip control unit for determining whether or not the next frame is encoded to avoid underfiow or overflow of the rate distortion buffer based on the encoded bitstream.

A computer-readable medium having embodied thereon a computer program for executing a bit rate control method comprising:

• (a) performing initialization in which a video frame is inputted and a memory is allocated to a rate distortion buffer where an encoded bitstream to be transmitted to a decoder is stored;
• (b) intra-coding the inputted video frame;
• (c) updating the rate distortion buffer;
• (d) performing post-frame skip in which whether or not a next video frame should be encoded is determined to avoid underfiow or overflow of the rate distortion buffer;
• (e) receiving the next video frame, and estimating a quantization parameter if the received video frame is not a first video object plane, and inter-coding the received video frame if the received video frame is a first video object plane;
• (f) performing one of a back propagation model update and a self-organizing control based on the number of the inputted video frames after inter-coding the next video frame, and then performing the post-frame skip again;
• and
• (g) receiving the next video frame and estimating quantization parameters of all the video frames or performing the self-organizing control in all the video frames.