User-Priority Based AV1 Coding Tool Selection

AV1 is an open-source video coding technique developed by Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia). Many powerful coding tools introduced to AV1 has made its encoding time significantly increased. In this paper, we aim at simplifying the AV1 encoder by facilitating selection of some coding tools depending on users' specific application preference. We firstly design a coding tool OFF-test to evaluate coding performance of intra, inter, and in-loop filter coding tools in AV1 encoder in order to define a criterion to evaluate the importance of each coding tool by measuring the Bjøntegaard delta bit rate (BDBR) loss and time saving (TS) when each coding tool is turned OFF. Furthermore, the importance of each coding tool is analyzed based on the predefined criterion. Lastly, we suggest two intra coding tool selection methods, three inter coding tool selection methods, and three overall coding tool selection methods to simplify AV1 encoder based on users' preference of quality-priority or low-complexity-priority. Experimental results show that our proposed low-complexity-priority selection method saves 30.72% of encoding time with only 0.91% loss in BDBR sense, and the quality-priority selection method saves 4.64% of encoding time with 0.02% BDBR loss.