Page 18 - ITU Journal, ICT Discoveries, Volume 3, No. 1, June 2020 Special issue: The future of video and immersive media

ITU Journal: ICT Discoveries, Vol. 3(1), June 2020

A study of the extended perceptually weighted peak signal-to-noise ratio (XPSNR)

for video compression with different resolutions and bit depths
Pages 65-72

Christian R. Helmrich, Sebastian Bosse, Heiko Schwarz, Detlev Marpe, Thomas Wiegand

Fast and accurate estimation of the visual quality of compressed video content, particularly for quality-of-
experience (QoE) monitoring in video broadcasting and streaming, has become important. Given the relatively
poor performance of the well-known peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) for such tasks, several video quality
assessment (VQA) methods have been developed. In this study, the authors’ own recent work on an extension
of the perceptually weighted PSNR, termed XPSNR, is analyzed in terms of its suitability for objectively
predicting the subjective quality of videos with different resolutions (up to UHD) and bit depths (up to 10
bits/sample). Performance evaluations on various subjective-MOS annotated video databases and
investigations of the computational complexity in comparison with state-of-the-art VQA solutions like VMAF
and (MS-)SSIM confirm the merit of the XPSNR approach. The use of XPSNR as a reference model for
visually motivated control of the bit allocation in modern video encoders for, e. g., HEVC and VVC is outlined
as well.

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The video codec landscape in 2020

Pages 73-83

Michel Kerdranvat, Ya Chen, Rémi Jullian, Franck Galpin, Edouard François
Video compression is a key technology for new immersive media experiences, as the percentage of video data
in global Internet traffic (80% in 2019 according to the 2018 Cisco Visual Networking Index report) is steadily
increasing. The requirement for higher video compression efficiency is crucial in this context. For several years
intense activity has been observed in standards organizations such as ITU-T VCEG and ISO/IEC MPEG
developing Versatile Video Coding (VVC) and Essential Video Coding (EVC), but also in the ICT industry
with AV1. This paper provides an analysis of the coding tools of VVC and EVC, stable since January 2020,
and of AV1 stable since 2018. The quality and benefits of each solution are discussed from an analysis of their
respective coding tools, measured compression efficiency, complexity, and market deployment perspectives.
This analysis places VVC ahead of its competitors. As a matter of fact, VVC has been designed by the largest
community of video compression experts, that is JVET (Joint Video Experts Team between ITU-T and
ISO/IEC). It has been built on the basis of High Efficiency Video Coding (H.265/HEVC) and Advanced Video
Coding (H.264/AVC) also developed by joint teams, respectively JCT-VC and JVT, and issued in 2013 and
2003 respectively.

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