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Quality comparison of the HEVC and VP9 encoders performance

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Abstract

This paper reports a comparison between two recent video codecs, namely the HEVC and the VP9, using High Definition Video Sequences encoded with different bit rates. A subjective test for the evaluation of the provided Quality of Experience is reported. The video sequences were shown to a panel of subjects on a High Definition LED display and the subjective tests were performed using a Single Stimulus Methodology. The results shown that the HEVC encoder provides a better visual quality on low bit rates than the VP9. Similar performance was obtained for visually lossless conditions, although the HEVC requires lower bit rates to reach that level. Moreover, the correlation of the subjective evaluation and three tested objective metrics (PSNR, SSIM, and FSIM) revealed a good representation of the subjective results, particularly the SSIM and the FSIM metrics.

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Notes

  1. https://hevc.hhi.fraunhofer.de/svn/svn_HEVCSoftware.

  2. https://hevc.hhi.fraunhofer.de/svn/svn_HEVCSoftware/tags/HM-13.0.

  3. http://www.webmproject.org/vp9.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are very grateful to the Instituto de Telecomunicações and Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (project UID/EEA/50008/2013), and to the Optics Center of Universidade da Beira Interior where this work has been conducted.

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Correspondence to Marco V. Bernardo.

Appendix: settings for the encoders

Appendix: settings for the encoders

Table 4 Selected setting for HM reference software encoder
Table 5 Selected setting for VP9 encoder

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Fernandes, P., Bernardo, M.V., G. Pinheiro, A.M. et al. Quality comparison of the HEVC and VP9 encoders performance. Multimed Tools Appl 76, 13633–13649 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3726-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3726-2

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