The increasing demand for new formats of visual information video poses challenging requirements in the various elements of current multimedia communication chains. Omnidirectional video, i.e., 360-video, is one of such formats, which has been pushing forward worldwide research of new encoding standards. The next video coding standard, named Versatile Video Coding (VVC), is currently under development aiming to improve the coding efficiency attained by previous standards, also targeting omnidirectional video.
In comparison with the current High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, the VVC coding tools are supported by different data structures and prediction modes, which enable increased coding efficiency. This paper presents a summary of the novel coding tools currently under development in VVC and a performance comparison study between the HEVC and VVC for omnidirectional video. The quality metrics for this type of visual content are also described, following the common test conditions defined for the VVC. The performance evaluation study presented in this paper is focused on coding efficiency and computational complexity. The experimental results show that the objectives of VVC, concerning coding efficiency are already attained (30% to 60% better than HEVC), although at the cost of 4.96 times higher computational complexity.