Analysis of video quality losses in the homogenous HEVC video transcoding

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive quantitative analysis of video quality losses in homogenous HEVC transcoding, evaluating the impact of bitrate changes and the effectiveness of the CPDT method using extensive experiments.

Contribution

It offers the first extensive evaluation of the CPDT approach in HEVC transcoding, highlighting quality degradation patterns and dependencies on bitrate changes.

Findings

Transcoding causes measurable quality degradation compared to direct compression.

Quality loss depends on source and target bitrates, with clear patterns shown in graphs.

The study fills a gap by providing detailed analysis previously unavailable in literature.

Abstract

The paper presents quantitative analysis of the video quality losses in the homogenous HEVC video transcoder. With the use of HM15.0 reference software and a set of test video sequences, cascaded pixel domain video transcoder (CPDT) concept has been used to gather all the necessary data needed for the analysis. This experiment was done for wide range of source and target bitrates. The essential result of the work is extensive evaluation of CPDT, commonly used as a reference in works on effective video transcoding. Until now no such extensively performed study have been made available in the literature. Quality degradation between transcoded video and the video that would be result of direct compression of the original video at the same bitrate as the transcoded one have been reported. The dependency between quality degradation caused by transcoding and the bitrate changes of the transcoded data stream are clearly presented on graphs.