Abstract
Video compression is the core technology in mobile (mHealth) and electronic (eHealth) health video streaming applications. With global video traffic projected to reach 82% of all Internet traffic by 2022, there is a strong need to develop efficient compression algorithms to accommodate expected future growth. For the first time in decades, and especially since ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T VCEG expert groups strategically joined forces to develop the highly successful H.264/AVC standard, we have two distinct initiatives competing for the best performing video codec. On the one hand, we have the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) that support a new, royalty free video codec generation, termed AV1, based on VP8 and VP9 efforts. On the other hand, the Joint Video Exploration Team (JVET) has been developing the Versatile Video Codec (VVC) as the successor of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard. At the same time, the breadth of applications utilizing video codecs, involving significant content variability and moving across the video resolution ladder, to satisfy different constraints, have resulted in mixed literature results, with respect to the best performing codec. In this paper, we compare the performance of emerging VVC and AV1 codecs, along with popular HEVC implementations, namely the HEVC Test Model (HM) and x265, as well as earlier, VP9 codec, and investigate their suitability for medical applications. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first performance comparison of emerging VVC and AV1 video codecs for use in the healthcare domain. Experimental evaluation based on three datasets (ultrasound, emergency scenery, and general-purpose videos) demonstrate that VVC outperforms all rival codecs while AV1 achieves better compression efficiency than HEVC in all cases but low-resolution ($560\times448$ @40Hz) ultrasound videos of the common carotid artery. Furthermore, the use of video despeckling prior to ultrasound video compression can provide significant bitrate savings.
Highlights
Video codecs are currently experiencing unparalleled levels of growth driven by unprecedented video traffic demands that are projected to reach 82% of all Internet traffic byThe associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Xinfeng Zhang.2022 [1]
COMMON CAROTID ARTERY VIDEO DATASET I 1) OBJECTIVE VIDEO QUALITY ASSESSMENT Results for the Common Carotid Artery (CCA) ultrasound video dataset I are depicted in Table 4 and Fig. 6
Despite Versatile Video Coding (VVC) still being in the development process, it already outperforms its High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) predecessors, and its main competitor, AV1
Summary
Video codecs are currently experiencing unparalleled levels of growth driven by unprecedented video traffic demands that are projected to reach 82% of all Internet traffic byThe associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Xinfeng Zhang.2022 [1]. Industry initiatives such as Google’s WebM project (leading VP8 and VP9 video codecs development), and subsequent. Panayides et al.: Battle of the Video Codecs in the Healthcare Domain formation of the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) [2] comprising key industry affiliates, have established a highly competitive environment, investing efforts towards creating the first ever royalty free video codec. In this context, AOM announced the code freeze of its debut encoder, AV1, in 2018, claiming the best encoding performance to date. The first version of the VVC standard is expected in 2020
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