Research

AV1 is the first royalty-free video coding standard developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), which was finalized in 2018. During its standardization process, coding tools were gradually adopted into the specification based on a tradeoff between multiple parameters, such as bitrate, quality, encoding and decoding implementation complexity. A fair comparison of the coding tools supported by this codec can be essential for encoder designers who seek to achieve a good balance among all these factors within their implementations. To this end, this paper compiles a tool-on/off analysis of several prominent coding tools supported by the AV1 specification. The analysis includes the impact of such tools on several objective quality metrics, i.e., PSNR, SSIM, and VMAF, when using the reference encoder libaom implementation, as well as the corresponding impact on the software (SW) runtime complexity of both the libaom encoder and decoder. Keywords: AV1, video compression, coding tools