A perceptual adaptive quantizer for quality improvement of HEVC

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is a new standard under development by the ISO and ITU-T. In this work an encoder which incorporates HVS models into the basic coding structure of the recommended HEVC standard is implemented, to improve the quality of the standard coder. Since human eye ultimately decides the quality of the received signal and the sole aim of HEVC is coding efficiency and quality improvement, this can be best achieved by selecting and incorporating appropriate Human Visual System (HVS) models into the standard coding structure. The proposed coder incorporates adaptive HVS based quantization matrices to improve the quality of reconstruction. The performance of the coder is compared with that of standard codecs such as MPEG-2, H.264/AVC and HEVC without perceptual models. The performance improvement for the proposed coder is evaluated using various objective quality measures such as PSNR, MSE, MSSIM, VIF, and VSNR.