Perceptual Video Coding Based on Visual Saliency Modulated Just Noticeable Distortion

To reduce the perceptual redundancy in the video coding process, human visual system (HVS)-based visual attention and visual sensitivity can be utilized due to their intrinsic natures. Just Noticeable Distortion (JND) is one of widely used models to simulate human visual sensitivity, while visual saliency map has been popular for years in image processing to describe the visual attention feature, which has been proved by the ability to enhance the visual sensitivity effect. In this paper, we proposed a perceptual video coding (PVC) scheme with visual saliency modulated JND model to suppress the DCT coefficient without resulting in noteworthy subjective quality degradation. The experimental results show that the PVC scheme with the proposed VS-JND model can save bit rates up to 35.58% in high bit rates case with the similar subjective quality compared with that of HEVC software reference code HM 16.12.