Quality and Error Robustness Assessment of Low-Latency Lightweight Intra-Frame Codecs for Screen Content Compression

Willème, Alexandre [UCL] Descampe, Antonin [UCL] Lugan, Sébastien [UCL] Macq, Benoît [UCL]

(eng) Today, many existing types of video transmission and storage infrastructure are not able to handle UHD uncompressed video in real time. To reduce the required bit rates, a low-latency lightweight compression scheme is needed. To this end, several standardization efforts, such as Display Stream Compression, Advanced DSC, and JPEG XS, are currently being made. Focusing on screen content use cases, this paper provides a comparison of existing codecs suited for this field of application. In particular, the performance of DSC, VC-2, JPEG 2000 (in low-latency and low-complexity configurations), JPEG and HEVC Screen Content Coding Extension (SCC) in intra mode are evaluated. First, quality is assessed in single and multiple generations. Then, error robustness is evaluated by inserting one-bit errors at random positions in the compressed bitstreams. Unsurprisingly, the most complex algorithm, HEVC SCC intra, achieves the highest compression efficiency on screen content. JPEG 2000 performs well in the three experiments while HEVC SCC does not provide multi-generation robustness. DSC guarantees quality preservation in single generation at high bit rates and VC-2 provides very high error resilience. This work gives the reader an overview of the objective quality assessment that will be conducted as part of JPEG XS evaluation procedures.