Compression Efficiency and Computational Cost Comparison between AV1 and HEVC Encoders

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the current state-of-the-art standard for video compression, finalized by ISO/IEC and ITU-T in 2013. However, as HEVC is protected by several patents and is subject to royalty policies, more than thirty companies recently joined efforts to develop a royalty-free codec, named AOMedia Video 1 (AV1). In the forthcoming years, AV1 is expected to be adopted by several companies and streaming service providers as the main digital video format. In this paper, the compression efficiency and the computational cost of AV1 is compared to its main concurrent, the HEVC standard. The methodology employed in this work uses equivalent quantization parameters in both encoders to measure compression efficiency in terms of Bjontegaard Delta (BD)-rate more accurately than related works. Experimental results show that the AV1 reference software requires an average computational cost 14.64 times greater than the HEVC Model, with a BD-rate increase of 16.35% in comparison to that encoder.