Investigating the impact of high frame rates on video compression

In this paper we investigate the impact of frame rate variation on HEVC video compression, and demonstrate that high frame rates (60+ fps) can lead to increased perceptual quality, notably in high bitrate environments. In order to quantify content dependence, a novel way of partitioning video sequences into categories is proposed. Results show that rate-quality performance is improved at higher frame rates for video sequences with camera motion, whereas lower frame rates are favorable in sequences with complex motion (e.g. dynamic textures). We calculate that 60 fps and 120 fps are optimal choices of frame rate at bitrates of 3 Mbps and 7 Mbps respectively, demonstrating that increased frame rates are both feasible and desirable, given current broadcast data rates.