Quality evaluation of HEVC and VP9 video compression in real-time applications

Abstract

Abstract-Video consumption over Internet has increased significantly over the recent years and occupies the majority of the overall data traffic. To decrease the load on the Internet infrastructure and reduce bandwidth taken by video, higher efficiency video codecs, such as H.265/HEVC and VP9, have been developed. The availability of these two new competing video coding formats raises the question of which is more efficient in terms of rate-distortion and by how much they outperform the current state-of-the-art coding standard, H.264/AVC. This paper provides an answer to this difficult question for low-delay video applications, e.g., real-time video streaming/conferencing or video surveillance. The benchmarking of HEVC and VP9 video compression was conducted by means of subjective evaluations, assuming web browser playback, an uncontrolled environment, and HD video content. Considering a wide range of bit rates from very low to high bit rates, corresponding to low quality up to transparent quality (when compared to the original video), results show a clear advantage of HEVC with average bit rate savings of 59.5% when compared to AVC and 42.4% when compared to VP9.

Impact of media-related SIFs on QoE for H.265/HEVC video streaming

“…Video coding affects the quality perception of video streaming as stated in literature [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31]. A variety of video coding standards have been analysed in this context, such as H.264/ advanced video coding (AVC) or H.265/HEVC.…”

“…It has been shown that H.265/HEVC allows 50% higher compression than its predecessor H.264/AVC without changes in subjective quality perception [23,24,32,33]. In addition, it has been realized that H.265/HEVC has 6dB higher peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) than H.264/AVC due to variable length of code blocks [24,25]. Furthermore, H.265/HEVC enables a higher degree of variation of codec parameters, such as coding block size, motion vector size, etc.…”

“…Furthermore, bitrate is related to the transmission efficiency. Simulation of video transmission with different resolutions has shown that higher resolution means higher quality [12,20,21,24,26,28], but also requires more bits to transmit through a network.…”

Comparison of Compression Efficiency between HEVC/H.265, VP9 and AV1 based on Subjective Quality Assessments

“…In [2] VP9 was claimed to be inferior to HEVC/H.265 by different statistics, whereas [3] revealed a similar performance between the two. To benchmark the performance of HEVC/H.265 and VP9, both objective and subjective assessments have been carried out in [4] and [5], with bitrates ranging from low to high corresponding to very low up to transparent video quality. In [4] a clear advantage of HEVC/H.265 over VP9 with almost twice as much bitrate savings was reported when using the low delay configuration on high definition (HD) and ultra high definition (UHD) video content.…”

“…To benchmark the performance of HEVC/H.265 and VP9, both objective and subjective assessments have been carried out in [4] and [5], with bitrates ranging from low to high corresponding to very low up to transparent video quality. In [4] a clear advantage of HEVC/H.265 over VP9 with almost twice as much bitrate savings was reported when using the low delay configuration on high definition (HD) and ultra high definition (UHD) video content. Similar results were obtained in [5] using UHD video content assuming a broadcasting configuration, noting a competitive performance of VP9 for some synthetic video.…”