Recent advances in perceptual H.265/HEVC video coding

H.265/High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), the latest video coding standard developed jointly by ITU-T and by ISO/IEC in the joint collaborative team on video coding (JCT-VC), has shown significant objective compression improvements over the last video coding standard H.264/AVC. After the establishment of H.265/HEVC, more and more attention has been paid on how to further improve the visual quality such that better coding efficiency could be achieved. In this paper, we review the progress of subjective optimization of H.265/HEVC based video coding systems and summarize the recent advances of perceptual H.265/HEVC video coding. Referring to our earlier work, we classify the current perceptual H.265/HEVC video coding technologies into two categories, vision-model based approach and signal-driven approach. Moreover, due to the new technologies such as Coding Tree Unit (CTU) structure and Sample Adaptive Offset (SAO). The future research directions for perceptual H.265/HEVC video coding are also discussed.