Quality assessment of MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 and HEVC compressed video in a telemedicine context
Amine Chaabouni, Julien Lambert, Yann Gaudeau, Nicolas Tizon, Didier Nicholson, Jean-Marie Moureaux · 2017
To meet doctors' needs to store and share medical data remotely, lossy compression seems, today, to be an appropriate solution to manage the huge amount of these medical data. However, as there is a risk to lose critical medical information, experts' subjective quality reviews should be considered with respect to compression efficiency. In this context, we try to compare the last two video encoding international standards performances, taking into account quality assessment issues. Results show us that HEVC is more efficient than MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, offering up to 54% bit-rate saving comparing to AVC/H.264. Besides, we showed that ENT medical videos can be advantageously encoded in SD instead of Full HD resolution for low bit-rate applications. Finally, by comparison with doctors' perception, the appropriate objective metrics MSE, NQM, SSIM and MSSIM validate the previous results and confirm the superiority of HEVC over MPEG-4 AVC/H.264. They are very promising for telemedicine applications, especially in low bit-rate context.