Adopting Perceptual Quality Metrics in Video Encoders: Progress and Critiques

There is a need for video encoders to generate bitstreams of quality that matches human evaluation. This is often achieved by adopting perceptual quality metrics in video encoders. A huge body of work has been devoted to the development of perceptual video quality metrics that take the properties of human visual system into account. It is our interest in this paper to study how the existing video coding systems can benefit from such perceptual quality metrics. Specifically, we examine the existing perceptual video coding systems and introduce the concept of “codec-friendliness,” meaning how the perceptual quality metrics can be nicely incorporated into the coding process of standard video coding algorithms. We conclude the study by suggesting guidelines for the development of future quality metrics from the video coding perspective.