A Novel Method Rate Distortion Optimization for HEVC Based on Improved SSIM

Objective appraisal method, for instance, sum of absolute difference (SAD) or sum of the squared errors (SSE), is adopted by high efficiency video coding (HEVC), which inherits conventional objective rate distortion model. However, these methods fail to achieve high consistency with subjective visual perception. In order to improve computational efficiency of the video coding in HEVC, in this article, structural similarity (SSIM) is considered as rate distortion cost function of HEVC. MSE is introduced into SSIM, so that a new rate distortion cost function can get. This problem can be solved by using the Lagrangian multiplier method. The simulation results showed that compared our proposed algorithm with HM13.0 in AI configuration, the performance of rate distortion is average improved about 2.6%, as well as getting better coding quality. In addition, no significant runtime increases in the stage of encoding.