VVC decoder intra prediction using approximate storage: an error resilience evaluation

This paper presents an error resilience evaluation of the intra prediction step in Versatile Video Coding decoders when approximate storage is employed in the Reference Line Buffer (RLB). We present an error injection framework to simulate the use of approximate storage in the RLB buffer with commonly used bit error rate (BER) values from literature for static random-access memory and dynamic random-access memory technologies. We perform an error resilience evaluation based on peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity for twelve video sequences, considering different decoding settings, with four quantization parameters, two encoding configurations, and seven BERs. We also present a few examples, showing how approximately decoded sequences can look and performing a subjective visual quality analysis. Our analysis characterizes how the impacts of approximation are dependent on video content and configurations. The results show that approximate storage can be used in some of the evaluated scenarios with very low degradation on the final visual quality of the decoded video sequences.