Performance comparison of VVC, AV1, and HEVC on 8-bit and 10-bit content
Pankaj Topiwala, Madhu Peringassery Krishnan, Wei Dai · 2018
This paper presents a study comparing the coding efficiency performance of three video codecs: (a) the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) Bench Mark Set 1 (BMS1); (b) AV1 codec of the Alliance for Open Media (AOM); and (c) the HEVC Main Profile Reference Software. Two approaches to coding were used: (i) constant quality (QP); and (ii) target bit rate (VBR). Constant quality encoding is performed with all the three codecs for an unbiased comparison of the core coding tools. Whereas, target bitrate coding is done with the AV1 codec to study the compression efficiency achieved with rate control, which can and does have a significant impact. Performance is tabulated for on two fronts: (1) objective performance based on PSNR’s and (2) informal subjective assessment. Our general conclusion derived from the assessment of objective metrics and subjective evaluation is that VVC (BMS1) appears to be superior to AV1 and HEVC under both constant quality and target bitrate coding constraints. AV1 shows superior coding gains with respect to HEVC under target bitrate coding, but in general has increased computational complexity and henceforth an encode time factor of 20 – 30 over HEVC.