A Fidelity-Assured Rate Distortion Optimization Method for Perceptual-Based Video Coding

Rate-distortion optimization (RDO) is one of the essential method to improve the video coding efficiency. The main target of RDO is to find the optimal tradeoff between the reconstructed video quality and encoding rate. In traditional video coding standards, e.g. the emerging H.266/Versatile Video Coding(VVC), the H.265/High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) and H.264/Advanced Video Coding (AVC), sum of squared error (SSE) is used as the distortion criterion because SSE can represent the image fidelity efficiently. Based on the existing research on human visual characteristic, the perceptual visual quality is not consistent with image fidelity. Accordingly, we propose a video coding method to improve the subjective quality while avoiding great fidelity degradation. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is efficient in preserving subjective qualities with only a little fidelity degradation when comparing to existing subjective quality based rate distortion optimization methods.