Encoding in the Dark

Low light scenes often come with acquisition noise, which not only disturbs the viewers, but it also makes video compression harder. These type of videos are often encountered in cinema as a result of artistic perspective or the nature of a scene. Other examples include shots of wildlife (e.g. mobula rays at night in Blue Planet II), concerts and shows, surveillance camera footage and more. Inspired by all above, we are proposing a challenge on encoding low-light captured videos. This challenge intends to identify technology that improves the perceptual quality of compressed low-light videos beyond the current state of the art performance of the most recent coding standards, such as HEVC, AV1, VVC etc. Moreover, this will offer a good opportunity for both experts in the fields of video coding and image enhancement to address this problem. A series of subjective tests will be part of the evaluation, the results of which can be used in a study of the tradeoff between artistic direction and the viewers' preferences, such as mystery movies and some investigation scenes in the film.