Proof-of-concept: role of generic content characteristics in optimizing video encoders

The influence of content characteristics on the efficiency of redundancy and irrelevance reduction in video coding is well known. Each new standard in video coding includes additional coding tools that potentially increase the complexity of the encoding process in order to gain further rate-distortion efficiency. In order to be versatile, encoder implementations often neglect the content dependency or they optimize the encoding complexity on a local scale, i.e. on a single frame or on the coding unit level without being aware of the global content type. In this contribution, an analysis is presented which coding tool settings of the recent High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard are most efficient for a given content type when balancing rate-distortion against computational complexity measured in encoding time. The content type is algorithmically determined, leading to a framework for rate-distortion-complexity based encoder parameter decision for any given video sequence. The implementability is demonstrated using a set of 35 Ultra-HD (UHD) sequences. The performance results and evaluations show that the encoding parameters may be predicted to optimize the video coding. For instance, predicting motion search range achieves complexity reduction of 36% on average when HEVC reference HM is used at a cost of bitrate (2%). When another HEVC coding standard software, x265, is used to predict the coding unit (CU) size, there is a reduction of 20% in bitrate and of 8% in distortion but there is a reduction of 6% in execution time.