# Bit Allocation Transfer for Perceptual Quality Enhancement of VVC Intra Coding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10970 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10970/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Bit Allocation Transfer for Perceptual Quality Enhancement of Traditional Video Codecs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07799/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.