HDR video quality evaluation of HEVC and VP9 codecs

Current increasing effort in the television industry towards High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging has raised the issue of the compression of HDR content. Offering a higher peak luminance and wider color gamut, HDR video introduces new challenges to the state-of-the-art video codecs such as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) or VP9, which have been designed and optimized for the compression of Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) content. This study presents a performance comparison between HEVC and VP9 in the HDR context through both objective and subjective evaluations. The experimental objective results have shown that HEVC offers from 0.6% to 38.2% bit rate savings over VP9 depending on the objective metric which is used. The subjective study demonstrated that, on average, bit rate savings greater than 47.7% can be achieved by HEVC for the same perceived quality as VP9.