Versatile Video Coding (VVC) allows for large compression efficiency gains over its predecessor, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). The added efficiency comes at the cost of increased runtime complexity, especially for encoding. It is thus highly relevant to explore all available runtime reduction options. This paper proposes a novel first pass for two-pass rate control in all-intra configuration, using low-complexity video analysis and a Random Forest (RF)-based machine learning model to derive the data required for driving the second pass. The proposed method is validated using VVenC, an open and optimized VVC encoder. Compared to the default two-pass rate control algorithm in VVenC, the proposed method achieves around 32% reduction in encoding time for the preset faster, while on average only causing 2% BD-rate increase and achieving similar rate control accuracy.

Accepted in IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), 2023