Analysis of the Perceptual Quality Performance of Different HEVC Coding Tools

Abstract

Each new video encoding standard includes encoding techniques that aim to improve the performance and quality of the previous standards. During the development of these techniques, PSNR was used as the main distortion metric. However, the PSNR metric does not consider the subjectivity of the human visual system, so that the performance of some coding tools is questionable from the perceptual point of view. To further explore this point, we have developed a detailed study about the perceptual sensibility of different HEVC video coding tools. In order to perform this study, we used some popular objective quality assessment metrics to measure the perceptual response of every single coding tool. The conclusion of this work will help to determine the set of HEVC coding tools that provides, in general, the best perceptual response.