4K Video Coding Efficiency in UAV Systems

With increasing requirements for high quality, low bandwidth video transmission systems, comes a demand for more ad hoc video encoders. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or just drones, have recently grown in popularity and use. Therefore, in this paper, we provide an efficiency comparison of the two most popular video encoders in a First-person view (FPV) drone piloting system. We film all the test sequences ourselves, using a drone with an attached 4K camera. Each sequence captures a scene with different spatiotemporal characteristics. Because video encoders are sensitive to video content or scene complexity, instead of doing a comprehensive comparison of all sequences at once, we first classify all the sequences into four groups. Finally, we examine the compression efficiency by varying the parameters with the highest impact on encoder operation. The quality of compressed footage is determined using four objective video quality measures. Due to high computational complexity, tests were performed on several nodes of a supercomputer and the relative encoding times were also considered.