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About this paper
Xin Xiong, Samuel Fernández-Menduiña, Eduardo Pavez, Antonio Ortega, Neil Birkbeck, Balu Adsumilli
Researchers from USC and YouTube/Google developed pre-processing methods to detect and avoid quality saturation in User-Generated Content compression, which otherwise wastes bitrate on encoding noise. These methods deliver 8% to 20% BD-rate savings compared to a naive baseline, effectively optimizing resource allocation without compromising perceived visual quality.
Key insights
- Measuring distortion against a denoised version of User-Generated Content (D-MSE) provides a robust proxy for optimal perceptual quality, naturally saturating at a non-zero distortion level where further bitrate is futile.
- Quality saturation can be efficiently detected at a block level in the transform domain by comparing expected quantization error with the inherent noise energy, bypassing full encoding/decoding iterations.
- A critical proportionality constant allows for the transfer of Lagrange multipliers, estimated from a low-complexity codec's rate-distortion curve, to a standard target codec, facilitating practical integration.
Summary by alphaXiv.
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