Video Quality Evaluation Methodology and Verification Testing of HEVC Compression Performance

The High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard (ITU-T H.265 and ISO/IEC 23008-2) has been developed with the main goal of providing significantly improved video compression compared with its predecessors. In order to evaluate this goal, verification tests were conducted by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding of ITU-T SG 16 WP 3 and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29. This paper presents the subjective and objective results of a verification test in which the performance of the new standard is compared with its highly successful predecessor, the Advanced Video Coding (AVC) video compression standard (ITU-T H.264 and ISO/IEC 14496-10). The test used video sequences with resolutions ranging from 480p up to ultra-high definition, encoded at various quality levels using the HEVC Main profile and the AVC High profile. In order to provide a clear evaluation, this paper also discusses various aspects for the analysis of the test results. The tests showed that bit rate savings of 59% on average can be achieved by HEVC for the same perceived video quality, which is higher than a bit rate saving of 44% demonstrated with the PSNR objective quality metric. However, it has been shown that the bit rates required to achieve good quality of compressed content, as well as the bit rate savings relative to AVC, are highly dependent on the characteristics of the tested content.