Objective quality assessment of AV1 video coding format

This bachelor’s thesis maps royalty-free video codecs and their history. It deals in detail with AV1 codec by Alliance for Open Media. The theoretical part of the thesis describes the historical development of royalty-free video formats and briefly describes the AV1 itself, including its implementations. Practical part evaluates compression efficiency of AV1 encoders using various objective video quality assessment methods (MS-SSIM, PSNR-HVS-M, VMAF) and compares them with encoders of H.264, H.265 and VP9 video formats. Moreover, it evaluates computational complexity and memory usage of various AV1 encoders.It was found that the AV1 format achieves better results of objective quality assessment than older formats in most cases. The closest objective quality to the reference implementation of the AV1 format (libaom) has the x265 encoder of the H.265 format. Another finding is that there are significant differences between AV1 encoders in both the resulting video quality and the encoding speed. Speed is dependent not only on the used encoder but also on encoder settings and the bit rate of the resulting video. The memory usage comparison shows significant optimization of the libaom encoder, whose newer version requires approximately half the memory to run than its one-year older version. The SVT-AV1 encoder needs the most memory.