Adaptive Lagrange Multiplier for Low Bit Rates in H.264

This paper describes a novel adaptive Lagrange multiplier algorithm based on the general Rate-Distortion model with dynamic lambda calculation for H.264 video coding. When experimentally tested with the JM 8.1a encoder on QCIF video sequences the algorithm provides 2.8% average bit rate saving with insignificant PSNR loss (around 0.13%) without computational complexity increase. Experiments indicate that the algorithm may also be adopted for higher bit rates.