VCA Filter Plugin for FFmpeg

VCA is an open source video complexity analyzer. The primary objective of VCA is to provide spatial and temporal complexity predictor for every frame/video segment/video in order to enhance predicting encoding parameters for applications like online per-title encoding.

Build

If you don't have the FFmpeg source code already then first you need to obtain the latest revision of the FFmpeg source code from its Git repository:

git clone https://git.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.git ffmpeg

Afterward, or if you already have an FFmpeg source tree, clone this repository.

git clone https://github.com/cd-athena/VCA-FFmpeg 

The plugin includes install_vca.sh shell script to copy vca source files and apply changes to the build files of ffmpeg:

./VCA-FFmpeg/install_vca.sh path/to/ffmpeg

Note that neither install_vca.sh nor vca source files should be moved to another folder for install_vca.sh to work.

Provided all copies and changes were succesful now you can (re)configure and (re)compile FFmpeg according to your operating system and requirements, there is no known conflicts and no special provisions for compilation must be made:

cd ffmpeg

./configure

make -j8

Alternatively to using install_vca.sh you can manually copy vca source files inside the libavfilter directory:

cp -n VCA-FFmpeg/libavfilter/* path/to/ffmpeg/libavfilter/

Then you have to manually include the lines provided in allfilters.c, Makefile and x86/Makefile files to the corresponding files in target FFmpeg source.

Usage

The filter supports following command line options:

Name	Description	Values	Default
blocksize	Set size of the DCT block for analysis	8, 16, 32	32
n	Set number of frames to process (-1 all)	-1, INT_MAX	-1
lowpass	Enable low-pass DCT (significantly faster)	true, false	true
simd	Enable accerelation with SIMD	true, false	true
file	Set file where to print analysis information	string	NULL
brightness	Enable analysis of brightness	true, false	false
chroma	Enable analysis of UV chroma channels	true, false	false
yuview	Produce a detailed blockwise output for YUView	true, false	false

Example usage:

Use all defaults and output to vca.csv

./ffmpeg -i input.y4m -vf vca=file=vca.csv -f null -

Enable brightness with blocksize 16 write to vca.csv

./ffmpeg -i input.y4m -vf vca=blocksize=16:brightness=true:file=vca.csv -f null -

Enable chroma and brightness calculations with blocksize 32 write to vca.csv

./ffmpeg -i input.y4m -vf vca=chroma=true:brightness=true:file=vca.csv -f null -

Citation

If you use this project in your research, please cite:

@inproceedings{vca,
  title={VCA: Video Complexity Analyzer},
  author={Menon, Vignesh V and Feldmann, Christian and Amirpour, Hadi and Ghanbari, Mohammad and Timmerer, Christian},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the 13th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference},
  pages={259--264},
  year={2022},
  publisher={ACM},
  doi={10.1145/3524273.3532896}
}