Improving video coding quality by perceptual rate-distortion optimization

The goal of this work is to seek a feasible direction of video coding that can provide a significant quality improvement over H.264. In light of the well-known findings that the distortion metric for video quality has a profound impact on video coding performance and that traditional metrics such as mean square error are poorly correlated with human perception, we identify perceptual video coding, more specifically, perceptual-based rate-distortion optimization, as a sensible approach that has the potential to help drive the performance of video coding to a significantly higher quality level. This technology assessment is supported by experiments with various video sequences, bit-rates, and encoding profiles. The results show that the perceptual-based RDO can indeed bring significant quality improvement for H.264.