  Consistent quality oriented rate control in video coding has attracted much
more attention. However, the existing efforts only focus on decreasing
variations between every two adjacent frames, but neglect coding trade-off
problem between intra and inter frames. In this paper, we deal with it from a
new perspective, where intra frame quantization parameter (IQP) and rate
control are optimized for balanced coding. First, due to the importance of
intra frames, a new framework is proposed for consistent quality oriented IQP
prediction, and then we remove unqualified IQP candidates using the proposed
penalty term. Second, we extensively evaluate possible features, and select
target bits per pixel for all remaining frames, average and standard variance
of frame QPs, where equivalent acquisition methods for QP features are given.
Third, predicted IQPs are clipped effectively according to bandwidth and
previous information for better bit rate accuracy. Compared with High
Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) reference baseline, experiments demonstrate that
our method reduces quality fluctuation greatly by 37.2% on frame-level standard
variance of peak-signal-noise-ratio (PSNR) and 45.1% on that of structural
similarity (SSIM). Moreover, it also can have satisfactory results on
Rate-Distortion (R-D) performance, bit accuracy and buffer control.
