Advanced Video Quality Assessment of Leading Codecs: AV1, VVC, and Their Draft Successor Designs

AV1 and VVC are today top performing video codecs, with VVC holding an edge (in our previous estimates, about 10-12%). Moreover, both organizations are busy working on advancements of their codecs, respectively. Current work within the ISO/IEC/ITU committees shows updates with improvements of about 15% over VVC on common test data, while the Alliance for Open Media, the source of AV1, is already working on AV2 (called AVM), with an as yet unknown performance gain (but targeting about 20%) over AV1. We compare the performance of these codecs objectively on well-known 1080p test data, restricting to Standard Dynamic Range in this study (we treat HDR in an accompanying paper), not only using PSNR, but more advanced video quality assessment tools such as SSIM, VMAF, and FastVDO's quality measure, FVQ. We highlight the similarities and difference between the well-worn PSNR, and the more advanced approaches, to develop a nominal performance comparison among these leading video codecs. In this context, we use full reference video quality assessment. We observe that the more advanced metrics may be picking up on differences in quality that PSNR misses.