Compression efficiency of the emerging video coding tools

With the drastic increasing of multimedia applications and video coarse consumption, video compression and content quality evaluation have become an exciting and challenging topic. Recently, a new coding tool has been developed under the Joint Exploration Model (JEM) software with the main goal to provide a high bit rate saving compared to the HEVC standard. In this paper we present a performance-based comparison between the JEM and HEVC reference software (HM) through an objective measurements and a subjective quality assessments. A set of video sequences, in two spatial resolutions High Definition (HD) and Ultra-High Definition (UHD), have been used in this study. These videos are encoded using both JEM and HM software at different bitrates. Results have shown that the JEM codec enables, subjectively, a quality enhancement up to 40% at similar low bit rates. Objectively, this quality improvement is ranging from 35% to 37% depending on the spatial resolution. However, at high bit rate, the HM reference software enables a high video quality and thus its becomes more difficult to perceive the quality enhancement is about brought by the JEM codec. In addition, some video contents are difficult to encode and, consequently, the JEM enables only slight perceived quality improvement especially at the highest considered bitrates and for 4K resolutions.