{"ID":2856082,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10970","arxiv_id":"2510.10970","title":"Bit Allocation Transfer for Perceptual Quality Enhancement of VVC Intra Coding","abstract":"Mainstream image and video coding standards -- including state-of-the-art codecs like H.266/VVC, AVS3, and AV1 -- adopt a block-based hybrid coding framework. While this framework facilitates straightforward optimization for Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), it struggles to effectively optimize perceptually-aligned metrics such as Multi-Scale Structural Similarity (MS-SSIM). To address this challenge, this paper proposes a low-complexity method to enhance perceptual quality in VVC intra coding by transferring bit allocation knowledge from end-to-end image compression. We introduce a lightweight model trained with perceptual losses to generate a quantization step map. This map implicitly captures block-level perceptual importance, enabling efficient derivation of a QP map for VVC. Experiments on Kodak and CLIC datasets demonstrate significant advantages, both in execution time and perceptual metric performance, with more than 11% BD-rate reduction in terms of MS-SSIM. Our scheme provides an efficient, practical pathway for perceptual enhancement of traditional codecs.","short_abstract":"Mainstream image and video coding standards -- including state-of-the-art codecs like H.266/VVC, AVS3, and AV1 -- adopt a block-based hybrid coding framework. While this framework facilitates straightforward optimization for Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), it struggles to effectively optimize perceptually-aligned me...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10970","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10970v2","authors":"[\"Runyu Yang\",\"Ivan V. Bajić\"]","published":"2025-10-13T03:21:16Z","proceeding":"eess.IV","tasks":"[\"eess.IV\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}