Evaluation of Perceptual Video Coding
Date Issued
2012
Date
2012
Author(s)
Su, Po-Yen
Abstract
There is a need to seek a feasible direction of video coding that can provide a significant quality improvement over existing video coding standards. In light of the well-known findings that the distortion metric for video quality has a profound impact on video coding performance and that traditional metrics such as mean square error are poorly correlated with human perception, we identify perceptual video coding, more specifically, adopting perceptual quality metrics in video coding, as a sensible approach that has the potential to help drive the performance of video coding to a significantly higher quality level. In this thesis, the structural similarity index is adopted as the distortion metric in the rate-distortion optimization framework and an average of 12% bitrate reduction is achieved over the JM reference software of H.264/AVC. This result proves that the existing video coding systems can benefit from adopting perceptual quality metrics. However, we have found that the SSIM index and the like cannot be easily adopted in video coding systems because most perceptual quality metrics are developed without considering the integration with video encoder. Here we introduce the concept of “codec-friendliness,” meaning how the perceptual quality metrics can be nicely incorporated into the coding process of standard video coding algorithms. We conclude the study by suggesting guidelines for the development of future quality metrics from the video coding perspective.
Subjects
perceptual video coding
structural similarity
mode decision
rate-distortion optimization
human visual system
perceptual quality metric
codec-friendliness
Type
thesis
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