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Improving compression efficiency of HEVC using perceptual coding

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Abstract

The introduction of the new coding tools in HEVC has brought significant bitrate savings compared to the previous standard, H.264/AVC. In both standards, the mean square error (MSE) is used for measuring distortion in the rate distortion optimization process of the coding unit structure and mode selection. However, MSE is not a good measure to use for measuring visual quality as it poorly correlates with human perception. Integration of a video quality metric based on the characteristics of the Human Visual System (HVS) inside the rate distortion optimization procedure is expected to improve the compression efficiency of video coding. In this paper, the PSNR-HVS measure is used in the rate distortion optimization process for the coding unit structure and mode selection. In the first step, we find the scaling factor for the Lagrangian multiplier based on the proposed perceptual approach. In the second step, we find optimal Lagrangian multiplier depending on the quantization parameter. The compression efficiency of the proposed approach is compared to that of HEVC. Simulations prove that the proposed approach yields higher compression efficiency.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the NPRP grant # NPRP 4-463-2-172 from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of the Qatar Foundation). The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.

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  1. University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

    Sima Valizadeh, Panos Nasiopoulos & Rabab Ward

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  1. Sima Valizadeh
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  2. Panos Nasiopoulos
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  3. Rabab Ward
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Correspondence to Sima Valizadeh.

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Valizadeh, S., Nasiopoulos, P. & Ward, R. Improving compression efficiency of HEVC using perceptual coding. Multimed Tools Appl 80, 10235–10254 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-09442-z

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