Perceptually-Driven Video Coding with the Daala Video Codec
This addresses the problem of patent restrictions in video coding for developers and users, but it is incremental as it builds on existing codec designs.
The paper tackles the challenge of developing a competitive royalty-free video codec by replacing traditional tools with perceptually-driven alternatives, showing results in the context of the Alliance for Open Media's codec development.
The Daala project is a royalty-free video codec that attempts to compete with the best patent-encumbered codecs. Part of our strategy is to replace core tools of traditional video codecs with alternative approaches, many of them designed to take perceptual aspects into account, rather than optimizing for simple metrics like PSNR. This paper documents some of our experiences with these tools, which ones worked and which did not. We evaluate which tools are easy to integrate into a more traditional codec design, and show results in the context of the codec being developed by the Alliance for Open Media.