Last week we were delighted to receive the news that the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers’ (SMPTE) Journal of the Year Award will be presented to MediaKind’s Julien Le Tanou and Médéric Blestel for their article “Analysis of Emerging Video Codecs: Coding Tools, Compression Efficiency, and Complexity.” This is a fantastic achievement! The Journal Award is presented to the author(s) of the most outstanding paper originally published in the SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal during the preceding calendar year.

Analysis of emerging video codecs: coding tools, compression efficiency and complexity

Their research comes at a time when many related studies are evaluating video codec performances based on different test conditions, scenarios or codec implementations, which makes comparisons sometimes unfair and at the very least, difficult to interpret. Instead, Julien and Médéric’s paper provides a neutral and well-balanced evaluation of compression and run time performance for both AV1 and VVC codecs, using their respective reference models in comparison to two HEVC codec implementations.

Their main findings showed that based on an objective analysis, AV1 allows bitrate reductions of 10 percent in comparison to an HEVC Test Model (HM) for the same peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and Structural SIMilarity (SSIM) quality scores, while increasing encoding runtime by 55.5 times. However, they also show that this objective advantage in coding efficiency does not necessarily translate into gain in terms of subjective quality assessment. The overall objective results show VVC to be the best candidate for compression technology beyond HEVC.

Read the paper in full:  Read it here!

Congratulations to Julien and Médéric! They will be recognized with this award during the SMPTE Awards Gala, part of this year’s interactive remote SMPTE 2020 event, which takes place on November 11 and 12 2020.