Comparison of Dirac and H.264/AVC Coding Quality Using Objective Video Quality Measures

Digital video braodcasting requires high image quality, keeping the bitrate as low as possible at the same time. In the digital photography, new image compression standard named JPEG2000 proves to be more efficient than JPEG in subjective evaluation. JPEG2000 uses discrete wavelet transform (DWT) while JPEG uses discrete cosine transform (DCT). In video coding there are two most popular multi-purpose coding formats, MPEG-2 and H.264/AVC also known under the name MPEG-4 Part 10. Both of these formats use DCT. This paper present comparison of the coding quality of H.264/AVC and newly developed Dirac codec. Dirac codec unlike H.264/AVC uses DWT. For the quality comparison of two standards, PSNR, VQM and SSIM methods are used.