Minimizing Compression Artifacts for High Resolutions with Adaptive Quantization Matrices for HEVC

TL;DR

This paper introduces an adaptive quantization matrix method for HEVC that considers display resolution to reduce compression artifacts, significantly improving video quality on high-resolution displays.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel adaptive quantization matrix technique for HEVC that accounts for display resolution, enhancing artifact reduction compared to standard methods.

Findings

Achieves up to 56.5% BD-Rate reduction in the enhancement layer.

Improves SSIM score to 0.8660 from 0.8538.

Demonstrates effectiveness on SHVC two-layered bit-stream.

Abstract

Visual Display Units (VDUs), capable of displaying video data at High Definition (HD) and Ultra HD (UHD) resolutions, are frequently employed in a variety of technological domains. Quantization-induced video compression artifacts, which are usually unnoticeable in low resolution environments, are typically conspicuous on high resolution VDUs and video data. The default quantization matrices (QMs) in HEVC do not take into account specific display resolutions of VDUs or video data to determine the appropriate levels of quantization required to reduce unwanted compression artifacts. Therefore, we propose a novel, adaptive quantization matrix technique for the HEVC standard including Scalable HEVC (SHVC). Our technique, which is based on a refinement of the current QM technique in HEVC, takes into consideration specific display resolutions of the target VDUs in order to minimize compression artifacts. We undertake a thorough evaluation of the proposed technique by utilizing SHVC SHM 9.0 (two-layered bit-stream) and the BD-Rate and SSIM metrics. For the BD-Rate evaluation, the proposed method achieves maximum BD-Rate reductions of 56.5% in the enhancement layer. For the SSIM evaluation, our technique achieves a maximum structural improvement of 0.8660 vs. 0.8538.