Comparison of compression efficiency between HEVC/H.265 and VP9 based on subjective assessments
Martin Řeřábek, Touradj Ebrahimi · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2014
Current increasing effort of broadcast providers to transmit UHD (Ultra High Definition) content is likely to increase demand for ultra high definition televisions (UHDTVs). To compress UHDTV content, several alternative encoding mechanisms exist. In addition to internationally recognized standards, open access proprietary options, such as VP9 video encoding scheme, have recently appeared and are gaining popularity. One of the main goals of these encoders is to efficiently compress video sequences beyond HDTV resolution for various scenarios, such as broadcasting or internet streaming. In this paper, a broadcast scenario rate-distortion performance analysis and mutual comparison of one of the latest video coding standards H.265/HEVC with recently released proprietary video coding scheme VP9 is presented. Also, currently one of the most popular and widely spread encoder H.264/AVC has been included into the evaluation to serve as a comparison baseline. The comparison is performed by means of subjective evaluations showing actual differences between encoding algorithms in terms of perceived quality. The results indicate a general dominance of HEVC based encoding algorithm in comparison to other alternatives, while VP9 and AVC showing similar performance.