Compression efficiency analysis of AV1, VVC, and HEVC for random access applications

AOM Video 1 (AV1) and Versatile Video Coding (VVC) are the outcome of two recent independent video coding technology developments. Although VVC is the successor of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) in the lineage of international video coding standards jointly developed by ITU-T and ISO/IEC within an open and public standardization process, AV1 is a video coding scheme that was developed by the industry consortium Alliance for Open Media (AOM) and that has its technological roots in Google's proprietary VP9 codec. This paper presents a compression efficiency evaluation for the AV1, VVC, and HEVC video coding schemes in a typical video compression application requiring random access. The latter is an important property, without which essential functionalities in digital video broadcasting or streaming could not be provided. For the evaluation, we employed a controlled experimental environment that basically follows the guidelines specified in the Common Test Conditions of the Joint Video Experts Team. As representatives of the corresponding video coding schemes, we selected their freely available reference software implementations. Depending on the application-specific frequency of random access points, the experimental results show averaged bit-rate savings of about 10–15% for AV1 and 36–37% for the VVC reference encoder implementation (VTM), both relative to the HEVC reference encoder implementation (HM) and by using a test set of video sequences with different characteristics regarding content and resolution. A direct comparison between VTM and AV1 reveals averaged bit-rate savings of about 25–29% for VTM, while the averaged encoding and decoding run times of VTM relative to those of AV1 are around 300% and 270%, respectively.