An HEVC-compliant perceptual video coding using just noticeable difference

• Published in: Multimedia tools and applications 2022, Vol.81 (1), p.1257-1286
• Main Author: Guo, Jiefeng
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Coding; Coding standards; Computer Communication Networks; Computer Science; Data Structures and Information Theory; Discrete cosine transform; Efficiency; High definition; Just noticeable difference; Model testing; Multimedia; Multimedia Information Systems; Redundancy; Special Purpose and Application-Based Systems; Test methods; Video compression; Wavelet transforms
• ISSN: 1380-7501; 1573-7721
• DOI: 10.1007/s11042-021-11535-2

Video coding removes spatial, temporal, and statistic redundancies. After H.265, to further improve the coding efficiency, many efforts have been dedicated to removing the perceptual redundancy by using human perception-based methods. Just noticeable difference (JND) gives a good approximation for the human visual system and provides a valuable solution to remove the perceptual redundancy for perceptual video coding (PVC). However, there are still problems in the PVC architecture and the JND profile. One is although the whole discrete cosine transform (DCT) block are suppressed, there are still many transform coefficients below the suppression levels which are not adequately suppressed. Another problem is, to the best of our knowledge, most JND profiles are measured by image-based test methods and past display equipment. However, compared to images, videos exhibits temporal characteristics, and the current trend of the display equipment is towards full high definition. To solve these problems, we first propose a high efficiency video coding (HEVC)-compliant PVC architecture, where the coefficients in a DCT block can be adequately suppressed in a whole block manner. Second, we propose a video-based test method to model the temporal masking (TM) effect, called TM-JND. Experimental results show that the proposed TM-JND model can more accurately estimate the JND values for today’s display equipment and videos, avoiding the overestimate of the JND values like other existing models. The proposed PVC architecture achieves a significant bitrate reduction with a negligible subjective quality loss, compared with the HEVC test model HM 16.9.