Investigation of the Impact of Compression on the Perceptional Quality of Laparoscopic Videos

In recent years it has become common practice to archive video recordings of laparoscopic surgeries for documentation purposes and for retrospective review. Typically, the videos are captured in High Definition (HD) format but encoded with legacy coding standards like MPEG-2 requiring an enormous storage capacity. In this paper we present the results of a subjective quality assessment study with 37 medical experts. We identify appropriate encoding configurations for the H.264 AVC coding standard to guarantee a visually loss less quality with a significant bitrate reduction. Further, we show that it is not necessary to capture the highest possible quality for documentation and retrospective analysis. A lower technical quality with a substantially lower bitrate still provides sufficient semantic quality. We finally present basic recommendations for an efficient encoding strategy with an appropriate tradeoff between visual quality and bitrate.