JEM-post HEVC vs. HM-H265/HEVC performance and subjective quality comparison based on QVA metric

Current trends on video technologies and services are demanding higher bitrates, higher video resolutions, and better video qualities. This issue results in the need of a new generation of video coding techniques to increase the quality and compression rates of previous standards. Recently, a new coding tool is been developed by the Joint Exploration team on Future Video Coding (JVET) to define the Post HEVC referred by the Joint Exploration test Model software (JEM) with the main goal is to provide a high bit rate saving compared to the previous HEVC standard. In this paper we present a performance-based comparison between the post HEVC and H265/HEVC under test Model (HM) through an objective measurements and a subjective quality metric. A set of video sequences, in two spatial resolutions Ultra-High Definition (UHD) and Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) has been encoded using both JEM version and HM version software at different bitrates. Results have shown that JEM obtains a higher bit rate performance compared to HM reference software. In addition another subjective metric called Video Quality Assessment metric (VQA) was used to validate the superiority of JEM outputted videos quality compared to those of HM for the same bit rate.