Video quality evaluation and testing verification of H.264, HEVC, VVC and EVC video compression standards

Abstract

This paper is a comparative analysis with respect to video compression, coding efficiency with respect to performance and quality of the compressed video of Advanced Video Coding (H.264), High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), Versatile Video Coding (VVC) and MPEG-5 Essential Video Coding (EVC). The approach used for coding and comparative analysis is by keeping the video quality (QP) and group of pictures (GOP) constant for all the four codecs. Performance with respect to quality and coding efficiency is tabulated with respect to objective quality metrics analysis like (PSNR, M-SSIM, Bitrate, compression ratio) and subjective quality analysis. From both these techniques, it is observed that the VVC is superior to EVC, HEVC and H.264 in terms of compression. Therefore, more bitrate savings is observed for VVC which is 15% to 45% more when compared to EVC. Due to the complexity of the encoder block, VVC takes almost twice the time taken to encode EVC and HEVC taking the least time to encode the video bit streams. The conclusion of the quality of video keeping system parameters constant, showed VVC performing better than EVC, followed by HEVC and then H.264 for both objective and subjective analysis. Time taken to decode the encoded sequences is almost same with very less delta difference between the video codecs. The codec configurations with algorithmic enhancements is also explained in this paper.