Rate-distortion/complexity analysis of HEVC, VVC and AV1 video codecs

With the advent of smartphones and tablets, the amount of online video traffic has increased enormously. This, together with the growing popularity of high-definition video, motivated the development of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, released in 2013, with the aim of achieving a 50% bitrate reduction with respect to its predecessor, namely H.264/MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding (AVC). However, new contents with greater resolutions and requirements arise every day, making it necessary to reduce the bitrate to a further extent. In this regard, the efforts to become the leading video codec in the market resulted in two main contenders: the Joint Video Experts Team (JVET), which leads the development of the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard, and the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), which spearheads the AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) project. In this context, this paper presents a rate-distortion/complexity analysis of HEVC, VVC and AV1 main video codecs using objective measures of assessment in order to analyze their real capabilities. The analysis, which was done using well-defined test conditions, reveals that VVC considerably outperforms both HEVC and AV1 in terms of coding efficiency.