N16051, SHVC verification test report

SHVC, the scalable form of HEVC, codes video data of different qualities into layers, and allows subsets of the layers of video data to be extracted and used on their own. The verification tests of SHVC were conducted to evaluate the amount of savings that can be achieved by SHVC compared to HEVC simulcast, where video data of different qualities are separately coded into independent bitstreams using HEVC. This document reports the results for the verification testing of SHVC compression performance.
A subjective evaluation was conducted to compare the SHVC Scalable Main and Scalable Main 10 profiles to HEVC simulcast using the HEVC Main and Main 10 profiles, respectively, based on the compression performance of reference software developed as part of the SHVC development process. The tests covered a range of video resolutions from 540p to 4K, and various scalability cases, including spatial scalability with 1.5x ratio, spatial scalability with 2x ratio, SNR scalability, and colour gamut scalability (CGS).
The tests were performed according to the previously established test plan and as summarized in this report. The results confirmed that the tested encodings using the SHVC Scalable Main and Scalable Main 10 profiles achieve the same subjective quality as the HEVC simulcast encodings using the Main and Main 10 profiles, respectively, while requiring on average approximately 40~60% less bitrate. For each individual scalability case, the average bitrate savings are 39.5%, 48.4%, 59.3%, and 53.2% for spatial 2x, spatial 1.5x, SNR, and CGS scalability, respectively.