  A big part of the video content we consume from video providers consists of
genres featuring low-light aesthetics. Low light sequences have special
characteristics, such as spatio-temporal varying acquisition noise and light
flickering, that make the encoding process challenging. To deal with the
spatio-temporal incoherent noise, higher bitrates are used to achieve high
objective quality. Additionally, the quality assessment metrics and methods
have not been designed, trained or tested for this type of content. This has
inspired us to trigger research in that area and propose a Grand Challenge on
encoding low-light video sequences. In this paper, we present an overview of
the proposed challenge, and test state-of-the-art methods that will be part of
the benchmark methods at the stage of the participants' deliverable assessment.
From this exploration, our results show that VVC already achieves a high
performance compared to simply denoising the video source prior to encoding.
Moreover, the quality of the video streams can be further improved by employing
a post-processing image enhancement method.
