Patent attributes
Perceptual statistics may be used to compute importance maps that indicate which regions of a video frame are important to the human visual system. Importance maps may be applied to the video encoding process to enhance the quality of encoded bitstreams. The temporal contrast sensitivity function (TCSF) may be computed from the encoder's motion vectors. Motion vector quality metrics may be used to construct a true motion vector map (TMVM) that can be used to refine the TCSF. Spatial complexity maps (SCMs) can be calculated from metrics such as block variance, block luminance, SSIM, and edge strength, and the SCMs can be combined with the TCSF to obtain a unified importance map. Importance maps may be used to improve encoding by modifying the criterion for selecting optimum encoding solutions or by modifying the quantization for each target block to be encoded.