Optimizing Subjective Quality in HEVC-MSP: An Approximate Closed-form Image Compression Approach

HEVC, as the latest video coding standard, achieves top performance on image compression. On the basis of this, we propose a novel approach to optimize subjective quality for HEVC-based image compression. Specifically, a bit allocation formulation is established to optimize subjective quality with constraint on bit-rates. Then, we propose a recursive Taylor expansion method to quickly solve such a formulation with an approximate closed-form solution. The experimental results show the superior performance of our approach, with ~40% BD-rate saving over the state-of-the-art HEVC-MSP for face image compression.