Comparative Evaluation of VVC, HEVC, H.264, AV1, and VP9 Encoders for Low-Delay Video Applications

The evolution of the Internet and wireless communications led real-time applications with high and ultra-high-definition video to flourish. However, due to the fact that video is a bandwidth-greedy media stream, numerous codecs such as AV1 and Versatile Video Coding (VVC) that implement different techniques, have emerged. Indeed, investigating the performance of different compression standards is crucial to select the appropriate codec for a specific application. This paper provides a comparative assessment of the compression efficiency for the above-mentioned standards according to their prominent predecessors VP9, HEVC and H.264. Seven encoder implementations were used for benchmarking AV1, VP9, VVC, HEVC and H.264. i.e. AV1, VP9, VTM, (HM and x265), as well as (JM and x264) respectively. The low-dealy configuration pattern was utilized as it provides the lowest delay in contrast to random-access and all-Intra configurations. Indeed, to address real-time mobile applications, class C video sequences that are very sought after in many applications such as video surveillance or road safety were used for the conducted experiments. The obtained results show that each newly born codec outperforms its predecessor in terms of coding efficiency with an increase in the computational complexity. VVC achieves the highest compression performance in comparison to its predecessors even with the optimized version (x265, x264) with a noticeable increase in encoding run time, while VP9 provides average bit-rate overhead according to its successor AV1 for the industrial standards.