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Rate-distortion/complexity analysis of HEVC, VVC and AV1 video codecs

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Abstract

With the advent of smartphones and tablets, the amount of online video traffic has increased enormously. This, together with the growing popularity of high-definition video, motivated the development of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, released in 2013, with the aim of achieving a 50% bitrate reduction with respect to its predecessor, namely H.264/MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding (AVC). However, new contents with greater resolutions and requirements arise every day, making it necessary to reduce the bitrate to a further extent. In this regard, the efforts to become the leading video codec in the market resulted in two main contenders: the Joint Video Experts Team (JVET), which leads the development of the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard, and the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), which spearheads the AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) project. In this context, this paper presents a rate-distortion/complexity analysis of HEVC, VVC and AV1 main video codecs using objective measures of assessment in order to analyze their real capabilities. The analysis, which was done using well-defined test conditions, reveals that VVC considerably outperforms both HEVC and AV1 in terms of coding efficiency.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. High Performance Networks and Architectures group, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Albacete, Spain

    D. García-Lucas & P. Cuenca

  2. Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Informáticos, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    G. Cebrián-Márquez

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  1. D. García-Lucas
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  2. G. Cebrián-Márquez
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  3. P. Cuenca
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Correspondence to D. García-Lucas.

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This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, and the European Commission (FEDER funds) under project RTI2018-098156-B-C52, by the Regional Government of Castilla-La Mancha under project SBPLY/ 17/180501/000353, and by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports under grant FPU16/05692.

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García-Lucas, D., Cebrián-Márquez, G. & Cuenca, P. Rate-distortion/complexity analysis of HEVC, VVC and AV1 video codecs. Multimed Tools Appl 79, 29621–29638 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-09453-w

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