SSIM-Inspired Perceptual Video Coding for HEVC

Recent advances in video capturing and display technologies, along with the exponentially increasing demand of video services, challenge the video coding research community to design new algorithms able to significantly improve the compression performance of the current H.264/AVC standard. This target is currently gaining evidence with the standardization activities in the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) project. The distortion models used in HEVC are mean squared error (MSE) and sum of absolute difference (SAD). However, they are widely criticized for not correlating well with perceptual image quality. The structural similarity (SSIM) index has been found to be a good indicator of perceived image quality. Meanwhile, it is computationally simple compared with other state-of-the-art perceptual quality measures and has a number of desirable mathematical properties for optimization tasks. We propose a perceptual video coding method to improve upon the current HEVC based on an SSIM-inspired divisive normalization scheme as an attempt to transform the DCT domain frame prediction residuals to a perceptually uniform space before encoding. Based on the residual divisive normalization process, we define a distortion model for mode selection and show that such a divisive normalization strategy largely simplifies the subsequent perceptual rate-distortion optimization procedure. We further adjust the divisive normalization factors based on local content of the video frame. Experiments show that the proposed scheme can achieve significant gain in terms of rate-SSIM performance when compared with HEVC.