Deliver High Quality High Performance HEVC via Intel® Media Server Studio

Intel® Media Server Studio HEVC Software Encoder Quality
Evaluation for 4:2:0 10-bit Content
In this section, we first describe a test methodology employed for evaluating quality and then report on
relative quality measurements for the Media Server Studio HEVC Codec with respect to MPEG HEVC HM14
Codec, well known as a high quality reference albeit impractically slow.
Deliver High Quality, High Performance HEVC via Intel® Media Server Studio
Quality Evaluation Tests for 4:2:0 10-bit Content
For the purpose of quality evaluation, two test sets for 4:2:0 10-bit content, one for 1080p, and the other
for 1600p were employed. Each test set is composed of 3 publicly available challenging video test
sequences of 10-bit bit-depth. Further for each test sequence, 4 well-spaced quantizer (QP) values are
selected such that HEVC encoding for each sequence generates bit-rates in a wide but moderate range,
avoiding extreme values.
Specifically, Table 7A shows selected Ultra Definition 1600p (UHD1600p) test set, and Table 7B shows
High Definition 1080p (HD1080p) test set.
Table 7A UHD1600p Test Set for 4:2:0 10-bit and Quantizers used for Codec RD characteristics measurement
Quantizers used for RD char.
UHD1600p Test Sequence Resolution frm rate #frm Qp1 Qp2 Qp3 Qp4
1 Nebuta_Festival 2560x1600 60 300 22 27 32 37
2 SteamLocomotiveTrain 2560x1600 60 300 22 27 32 37
3 ReadySetGo 2560x1600 60 300 22 27 32 37
From UHD1600p test sequences referred to in Table 7A, Nebuta_Festival, and SteamLocomotiveTrain are
MPEG HEVC test sequences of 2560x1600 resolution that can be obtained from MPEG distribution sites
such as ftp://hvc:US88Hula@ftp.tnt.uni-hannover.de/testsequences. Further, the last sequence,
ReadySetGo, of this test set is also of size 2560x1600 but obtained by windowing into an original
3840x2160 resolution video using an offset of (764, 560) for top left hand corner - this original video can
be found at http://ultravideo.cs.tut.fi/#testsequences.
Table 7B HD1080p Test Set for 4:2:0 10 bit and Quantizers used for Codec RD characteristics measurement
HD1080p Test Sequence Resolution frm rate #frm
Quantizers used for RD char.
Qp1 Qp2 Qp3 Qp4
1 CrowdRun 1920x1080 50 500 26 30 34 38
2 ParkScene 1920x1080 24 240 23 26 29 32
3 Seeking 1920x1080 50 500 22 27 32 37
42
From HD1080p test sequences referred to in Table 7B, all three sequences CrowdRun, ParkScene, and
Seeking are of 1920x1080 resolution and can be obtained from http://media.xiph.org/video/derf/.