Saliency based perceptual HEVC

Abstract

Saliency represents the probability of human attention over the image therefore is important in understanding the importance of different areas in the image. In this paper, we consider how to utilize the saliency information in HEVC video coding. The graph-based visual saliency is incorporated with the quantization control in HEVC to reduce the bit rate of compressed video by using larger quantization parameter for the coding unit which has lower probability of attention. As shown in our experiments, the proposed method achieves up to 12% bit rate reduction without perceptual quality loss.