Performance Evaluation of the PWSSIM Metric for HEVC and H.264

Considering the current requirements of available bandwidth due to the increase of video transmissions, a new video encoding standard was released by the ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T VCEG groups. The main feature of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is to enable improved compression performance relative to existing standards in the range of 50% bit-rate reduction for equal perceptual video quality. Although the PSNR metric can show good results, it is not sensitive to several perceptual distortions which can perceive by a human being. The recently-proposed PW-SSIM metric incorporates the spatial information complexity to the SSIM metric. The HEVC encoding process maps some visual characteristics in order to avoid coding of redundant information. This paper comparatively evaluates the performance of the reference implementation of the HEVC and H.264 using the PW-SSIM metric, investigating its ability of mapping the aforementioned HEVC characteristic of incorporation of human vision heuristics.