Abstract

With the advent of smartphones and tablets, video traffic on the Internet has increased enormously. With this in mind, in 2013 the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard was released with the aim of reducing the bit rate (at the same quality) by 50% with respect to its predecessor. However, new contents with greater resolutions and requirements appear every day, making it necessary to further reduce the bit rate. Perceptual video coding has recently been recognized as a promising approach to achieving high-performance video compression and eye tracking data can be used to create and verify these models. In this paper, we present a new algorithm for the bit rate reduction of screen recorded sequences based on the visual perception of videos. An eye tracking system is used during the recording to locate the fixation point of the viewer. Then, the area around that point is encoded with the base quantization parameter (QP) value, which increases when moving away from it. The results show that up to 31.3% of the bit rate may be saved when compared with the original HEVC-encoded sequence, without a significant impact on the perceived quality.

Highlights

  • We live in a digital society in which the consumption of multimedia content is constantly increasing

  • The main difference of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) with respect to H.264/Advanced Video Coding (AVC) is the picture partitioning: while H.264/AVC used the traditional approach based on Macro-Blocks (MBs) for the Motion Estimation (ME) and Blocks for the transform, HEVC defines four new concepts: Coding Tree Unit (CTU), Coding Unit (CU), Prediction Unit (PU), and Transform Unit (TU)

  • Even though the quantization parameter (QP) value may change for each CU, as stated in Section 2, it must be considered that a QP changing too frequently will lead to a bit rate increment since the QP value is encoded in a differential way

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Summary

Introduction

We live in a digital society in which the consumption of multimedia content is constantly increasing. 2 E.T.S. de Ingenieros Informaticos, Centro de Tecnología Biomédica, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain terms of quality, video resolution, frames per second, and so on Taking this fact into consideration, and with the aim of achieving a greater bit rate reduction while preserving quality, the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) finished the first version of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard in 2013 [2]. Journal of Signal Processing Systems (2021) 93:1457–1465 video coding methods is to encode a small area around the gaze locations using a higher quality compared with other less visually important regions Such spatial prioritization is supported by the fact that only a small region of several degrees of the visual angle around the center of gaze is perceived with high spatial resolution.

Technical Background
Related Work
Proposed Dynamic Perceptual Quantization Algorithm
Quantization Levels
Sizes of the Areas for the Levels of Quantization
Variance Threshold for Level 1 Area
Actual Regions for Each Level of Quantization
Overall Frame Processing Algorithm
System Setup
Test Material and Metrics
Results
Conclusions and Future Work

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