Perceptual feature guided rate distortion optimization for high efficiency video coding

With the advances in understanding perceptual properties of the human visual system, perceptual video coding, which aims to incorporate human perceptual mechanisms into video coding for maximizing the perceptual coding efficiency, becomes an essential research topic. Since the newest video coding standard—high efficiency video coding (HEVC) does not fully consider the perceptual characteristic of the input video, a perceptual feature guided rate distortion optimization (RDO) method is presented to improve its perceptual coding performance in this paper. In the proposed method, for each coding tree unit, the spatial perceptual feature (i.e., gradient magnitude ratio) and the temporal perceptual feature (i.e., gradient magnitude similarity deviation ratio) are extracted by considering the spatial and temporal perceptual correlations. These perceptual features are then utilized to guide the RDO process by perceptually adjusting the corresponding Lagrangian multiplier. By incorporating the proposed method into the HEVC, extensive simulation results have demonstrated that the proposed approach can significantly improve the perceptual coding performance and obtain better visual quality of the reconstructed video, compared with the original RDO in HEVC.