A perceptually temporal adaptive quantization algorithm for HEVC

Abstract

Adaptive quantization (AQ) proves to be an effective coding tool to improve the performance of video coding. This paper presents a perceptually temporal AQ method to improve the subjective coding performance for High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). We first put forward a perceptual quality oriented motion estimation algorithm, which is conducted with a spatial-temporal just noticeable distortion (JND) model. Then one perceptual feature in temporal domain is proposed to develop our AQ method, which can generate different quantization parameter (QP) offsets for each coding unit (CU). The proposed method fully utilizes the temporal and perceptual characteristics of each CU, which can produce more visual-friendly QP offsets distribution. Experiments are conducted on HM16.0 (HEVC reference software), and with SSIM (Structure Similarity Index Metric) as the distortion metric, more than 8.08% and 7.95% rate savings can be obtained for Low-Delay-P (LDP) and Low-Delay-B (LDB) configurations on average, respectively. The subjective quality evaluation demonstrates that the proposed AQ method can achieve comparable visual quality as the HM16.0 while the proposed method can yield remarkable bitrate reductions.