HDR video quality evaluation of HEVC and VP9 codecs
Glenn Herrou, Wassim Hamidouche, Xavier Ducloux · 2016
Current increasing effort in the television industry towards High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging has raised the issue of the compression of HDR content. Offering a higher peak luminance and wider color gamut, HDR video introduces new challenges to the state-of-the-art video codecs such as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) or VP9, which have been designed and optimized for the compression of Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) content. This study presents a performance comparison between HEVC and VP9 in the HDR context through both objective and subjective evaluations. The experimental objective results have shown that HEVC offers from 0.6% to 38.2% bit rate savings over VP9 depending on the objective metric which is used. The subjective study demonstrated that, on average, bit rate savings greater than 47.7% can be achieved by HEVC for the same perceived quality as VP9.