Macroblock-Level Rate-Distortion Optimization with Perceptual Adjustment for Video Coding

Experiments have been conducted based on the reference coder JM12.2 of H.264/AVC. Simulation results show that the subjective qualities of the decoded frames are improved without compromising PSNR. Fig.1. blow shows the subjective performance of the proposed scheme for ´Foreman´ sequence. We can easily find that the perceptual quality of the detailed region (such as the wrinkles on the facial area) is significantly improved by comparing the two encoded frames. However, the distortion increased in the background is much less visually noticeable. And we have also performed subjective evaluation by inviting 20 people to be human observers for our experiment. 17 of them said there is an obvious improvement in video quality.