Versatile Video Coding (VVC) has set a new milestone in high-efficiency video coding. In the standard encoder, the λ-domain rate control is incorporated for its high accuracy and good Rate-Distortion (RD) performance. In this paper, we formulate this task as a Nash equilibrium problem that effectively bargains between multiple agents, {\it i.e.}, Coding Tree Units (CTUs) in the frame. After that, we calculate the optimal λ value with a two-step strategy: a Newton method to iteratively obtain an intermediate variable, and a solution of Nash equilibrium to obtain the optimal λ. Finally, we propose an effective CTU-level rate allocation with the optimal λ value. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to combine game theory with λ-domain rate control. Experimental results with Common Test Conditions (CTC) demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method, which outperforms the state-of-the-art CTU-level rate allocation algorithms.
@article{arxiv.2205.03595,
title = {$\lambda$-domain VVC Rate Control Based on Game Theory},
author = {Jielian Lin and Aiping Huang and Keke Zhang and Xu Wang and Tiesong Zhao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.03595},
year = {2022}
}