Complexity and Coding Efficiency Assessment of the Versatile Video Coding Standard

The Versatile Video Coding standard was finalized by the Joint Video Exploration Team in July 2020 and is currently considered the state-of-the-art video compression technology. VVC significantly improves coding efficiency compared to HEVC thanks to several new features and tools that incur a large increase in computational cost. This paper presents a complexity and coding efficiency assessment of VVC divided into three analyses, focusing on: (1) the impact of using SIMD optimizations in the VVC Test Model software, (2) the impact of limiting partitioning structures when encoding, and (3) the computational cost associated to each encoding tool in VVC. Experimental results show that SIMD optimizations accelerate the encoding time by 40%, on average, and that limiting the available partitioning structures can decrease encoding time between 40% and 73%. The software profiling revealed that inter-frame prediction is responsible for almost half of the total encoding time. Finally, the paper also presents an analytic discussion on tools and partitioning possibilities that are rarely chosen in the mode decision process despite their high impact in coding complexity.