Study On Coding Tools Beyond Av1

TL;DR

This paper explores new coding tools for next-generation video compression beyond AV1, demonstrating an average 8% reduction in bitrate with a package of integrated tools tested on libaom.

Contribution

It introduces a set of novel coding tools integrated into libaom, showing significant coding gains over AV1 in various video content scenarios.

Findings

Achieved up to 22% BD-rate reduction for intra coding.

Demonstrated the effectiveness of individual tools through tool-on/off tests.

Validated the combined coding gain across diverse video contents.

Abstract

The Alliance for Open Media has recently initiated coding tool exploration activities towards the next-generation video coding beyond AV1. With this regard, this paper presents a package of coding tools that have been investigated, implemented and tested on top of the codebase, known as libaom, which is used for the exploration of next-generation video compression tools. The proposed tools cover several technical areas based on a traditional hybrid video coding structure, including block partitioning, prediction, transform and loop filtering. The proposed coding tools are integrated as a package, and a combined coding gain over AV1 is demonstrated in this paper. Furthermore, to better understand the behavior of each tool, besides the combined coding gain, the tool-on and tool-off tests are also simulated and reported for each individual coding tool. Experimental results show that, compared to libaom, the proposed methods achieve an average 8.0% (up to 22.0%) overall BD-rate reduction for All Intra coding configuration a wide range of image and video content.