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

Intel® Media Server Studio HEVC Software Encoder Quality
Evaluation for 4:2:2 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 4:2:2 10-bit Content
For the purpose of quality evaluation, four test sets, one for each of the 4 main resolutions are selected
with each test set consisting of 3 publicly available video test sequences. Further for each test sequence,
4 well-spaced standard quantizer (QP) values used by MPEG for RD analysis for comparing HEVC encoders
are used.
Specifically, Table 15 shows the selected 4:2:2 10-bit Ultra High Definition 4K (UHD4K) test set.
Table 15 4:2:2 10-bit UHD4K Test Set and Quantizers used for Codec RD characteristics measurement
UHD4K Test Sequence Resolution frm rate #frm
Quantizers used for RD char.
Qp1 Qp2 Qp3 Qp4
1 FastWalk 4096x2304 50 300 22 27 32 37
2 Footbridge 4096x2304 24 300 22 27 32 37
2 Venetian_crossing 4096x2304 60 300 22 27 32 37
Since there is relatively little, public, free test content test for 4:2:2 10-bit UHD4K (or other resolution), the
above noted (non-free) content was employed. The content is described at http://www.testvid.com/alltest-material/4k-media/84-test-4k-quad-hd-usa-europe-asia-video-t2v041
and can be purchased from
http://www.testvid.com/.
Quality Evaluation Results for 4:2:2 10-bit Content
Before discussing detailed BD rate differences of each Media Server Studio TU mode wrt HM14, we first
establish the quality/bitrate tradeoff of HM 14 that will be used as reference.
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First, each video sequence of the 4:2:2 10-bit UHD4K is encoded using MPEG HEVC HM14 Reference
Encoder with each of 4 quantizers as specified in Table 15. The overall PSNR (averaged over frames) for
each test sequence for each Qp for each of luma (Y), and associated chroma components (U and V) is
collected along with the generated coding bitrate. For instance, Tables 16 shows the luma PSNR (chroma
PSNR is also collected but is not shown to keep tables manageable in size) and total bitrate for each test
sequence for each of 4 Qps is collected and is used in curve fitting to generate a continuous RD curve for
HM14 encoding of that test sequence.