Content-Adaptive Quantization Parameter Decision Method for Perceptual Video Coding
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School of Artificial Intelligence, Ningbo University, Ningbo 315211, China

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TN919.81

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The “Pioneer” and “Leading Goose” R & D Program of Zhejiang Province 2025C01035 The “Pioneer” and “Leading Goose” R & D Program of Zhejiang Province (No.2025C01035).

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    Abstract:

    Modern video coding standards such as the audio video coding standard 3 (AVS3) have substantially improved compression efficiency, but conventional rate-distortion optimization still relies heavily on signal-fidelity measures such as mean squared error (MSE) and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), which do not fully reflect the nonlinear characteristics of the human visual system (HVS). Knowledge-distillation-based perceptual coding methods can improve visual quality by transferring bit-allocation knowledge from perceptually optimized learned image compression models to block-level quantization parameter (QP) maps. However, most existing approaches are designed and evaluated under image or all-intra coding configurations. When directly extended to practical video coding with both intra- and inter-frame prediction, a fixed perceptual QP adjustment strategy may produce content-dependent performance fluctuations, especially for sequences with complex textures or strong temporal variation. To address this problem, this paper proposes a lightweight content-adaptive QP decision method for AVS3 video coding. Before actual encoding, a video content pre-analysis module processes the first ten frames of each segment using a pretrained VGG-16 network. Features from shallow, intermediate, and deep layers are pooled and fused to describe fine-grained texture, local structure, and high-level semantics. Temporal variation of the fused features is further summarized into four compact descriptors: Texture, motion, complexity, and motion consistency. A logistic-regression classifier then generates a binary gating signal to determine whether the downstream perceptual optimization module is enabled or bypassed. The classifier is trained on 292 non-overlapping 32-frame segments constructed from standard HEVC test sequences, where the ground-truth label of each segment is determined by the MS-SSIM BD-rate difference between perceptual optimization and the AVS3 anchor under identical coding configurations. Five-fold stratified cross-validation yields an accuracy of 92.3%, a precision of 82.0%, a recall of 93.3%, and an F 1 score of 87.3%. Experiments on representative 4K UHD sequences under random-access configuration show that, relative to the AVS3 HPM 12.0 anchor, the proposed method reduces the average BD-rate by 7.11% under multi-scale structural similarity (MS-SSIM) and by 3.39% under PSNR. When integrated into a highly optimized content-aware code (CAC), the average MS-SSIM BD-rate relative to the common HPM anchor improves from -21.45% to -26.24%, corresponding to an additional gain of 4.79 percentage points, while the average PSNR BD-rate improves from -3.60% to -7.01%. On a synthetic 64-frame sequence containing abrupt scene changes, the proposed adaptive scheme achieves an 11.82% MS-SSIM BD-rate reduction and a -0.53% PSNR BD-rate, whereas unconditional perceptual distillation yields a 6.79% MS-SSIM reduction but a 1.71% PSNR increase. These results indicate that the proposed segment-level gating mechanism can retain perceptual coding gains while reducing the risk of objective-quality degradation caused by unconditional perceptual adjustment. The method does not alter the standard bitstream structure and can be integrated as a low-overhead encoder-side decision module in conventional hybrid video coding frameworks.

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QI Haiyang, YAN Xingyu, ZHENG Yongkang, XU Long. Content-Adaptive Quantization Parameter Decision Method for Perceptual Video Coding[J]. Journal of Data Acquisition and Processing,2026,41(5):1306-1317.

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History
  • Received:July 03,2026
  • Revised:August 21,2026
  • Adopted:
  • Online: October 14,2026
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