Abstract
Versatile Video Coding (VVC/H.266) is the next-generation international video coding standard and a successor to the widespread High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265). This paper analyzes the rate-distortion-complexity characteristics of the VVC reference software (VTM10.0) by using HEVC reference software (HM16.22) as an anchor. In this independent study, the rate-distortion performance of VTM was benchmarked against HM with the objective PSNR, SSIM, and VMAF quality metrics and the associated encoder and decoder complexities were profiled at function level using Intel VTune Profiler on Intel Xeon E5-2699 v4 22-core processors. For a fair comparison, all our experiments were conducted under the VTM common test conditions (CTC) that define 10-bit configurations of the VTM codec for the addressed All Intra (AI), Random Access (RA), and Low Delay B (LB) conditions. The VTM CTC test set was also extended with complementary 4K UHD sequences to elaborate RD characteristics with higher resolutions. According to our evaluations, VTM improves the average coding efficiency over HM, depending on quality metric, by 23.0-23.9% under the AI condition, 33.1-36.6% under the RA condition, and 26.7-29.5% under the LB condition. However, the coding gain of VTM comes with $34.0\times $ , $8.8\times $ , and $7.5\times $ encoding complexity over that of HM under the AI, RA, and LB conditions, respectively. The corresponding overhead of the VTM decoder stays steady at $1.8\times $ across all conditions. This study also pinpoints the most complex parts of the VTM codec and discusses practical implementation aspects of prospective real-time VVC encoders and decoders.
Highlights
Our society is surrounded by a myriad of media applications where digital video is of the essence
Comcast estimates that the prevailing COVID-19 crisis has increased Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and videoconferencing by 210–285% and other video consumption by 20–40% over that of the pre-pandemic period [2]
This snowballing growth is mainly driven by the omnipresent connectivity and proliferation of advanced multimedia solutions that support emerging bandwidth-greedy formats like 4K/8K
Summary
Our society is surrounded by a myriad of media applications where digital video is of the essence. JEM was based on the HEVC reference software called HEVC test model (HM) [11] It attained around 30% better coding efficiency than HM but at a cost of 9−36× computational complexity [10]. This paper provides a comprehensive rate-distortioncomplexity (RDC) comparison between the VVC and HEVC video codecs. Over the past two years, a couple of works have already compared the features of VVC and HEVC, but most of them address VTM8.0 or earlier versions [19]–[25], i.e., before the VVC standard was approved, which makes them outdated. Our results were compiled from over 1300 encoding and decoding runs that took approximately 1650 days of CPU time This way, we are able to provide the video coding community with a reliable and comprehensive codec comparison.
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