Video Quality Evaluation Methodology and Result of AV2 Compression Performance

TL;DR

This paper introduces the AV2 video coding standard, details its evaluation methodology, and demonstrates significant compression gains over AV1 through experimental results.

Contribution

It defines the AV2 Common Test Conditions and presents new evaluation methods, content, and coding gain results for the AV2 standard.

Findings

AV2 achieves 29.81% BD-rate reduction in PSNR-YUV.

AV2 achieves 33.79% BD-rate reduction in VMAF.

Experimental results validate AV2's efficiency for streaming applications.

Abstract

The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) has developed the AV2 video coding standard to supersede AV1, aiming for substantial compression efficiency gains across diverse media applications. This paper details the quality and performance evaluation methodology defined in the AV2 Common Test Conditions (CTC), which introduces new evaluation methods and content, including convex-hull-based adaptive streaming (AS) configuration, user-generated content (UGC), and extended chroma formats. We present the coding gains of the AV2 (v13.0) against the AV1 baseline. Experimental results show that AV2 achieves significant Bj{\o}ntegaard-Delta Rate (BD-rate) reductions of 29.81\% and 33.79\% for PSNR-YUV and VMAF, respectively, under random access configuration, validating the efficiency of AV2 for next-generation streaming applications.