Video Compression for Screen Recorded Sequences Following Eye Movements

With the advent of smartphones and tablets, video traffic on the Internet has increased enormously. With this in mind, in 2013 the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard was released with the aim of reducing the bit rate (at the same quality) by 50% with respect to its predecessor. However, new contents with greater resolutions and requirements appear every day, making it necessary to further reduce the bit rate. Perceptual video coding has recently been recognized as a promising approach to achieving high-performance video compression and eye tracking data can be used to create and verify these models. In this paper, we present a new algorithm for the bit rate reduction of screen recorded sequences based on the visual perception of videos. An eye tracking system is used during the recording to locate the fixation point of the viewer. Then, the area around that point is encoded with the base quantization parameter (QP) value, which increases when moving away from it. The results show that up to 31.3% of the bit rate may be saved when compared with the original HEVC-encoded sequence, without a significant impact on the perceived quality.