Editorial Real-Time Implementation of VVC Standard for Consumer Electronic Devices

Wassim Hamidouche, Fernando Pescador, Thibaud Biatek, Edouard François

Abstract: We are pleased to present this Special Issue on this timely and important topic. The next generation ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T VCEG video coding standard called versatile video coding (VVC) was released in July 2020 <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[1]</xref> , <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[2]</xref> . Gls vvc includes some coding tools enabling an important coding gains estimated to 35% of bit-rate reductions for the same quality in terms of peak signal to noise ration (PSNR) compared with high efficiency video coding (HEVC) in random access (RA) coding configurations. For all intra (AI) configuration the improvement is a bit lower and estimated in a 25%. Moreover, subjective comparison recently conducted between HEVC and the VVC reference software, has shown that this gain is even higher reaching up to 50% of bit-rate reduction for the same perceived quality <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[3]</xref> - <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[4]</xref> . Unfortunately the coding gain is associated to an increase in the algorithm complexity at both encoder and decoder sides. The VVC encoder is estimated to be <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$8\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> more complex than HEVC in RA configuration and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$25\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> . The complexity of the VVC decoder is doubled compared to HEVC. Therefore, complexity reduction and optimization of VVC is critical to design of software and hardware real time VVC codecs for successful deployment on video consumer devices including among others TVs, mobile phones and tablets.