High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is currently being prepared as the newest video coding standard of the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group and the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group. The main goal of the HEVC standardization effort is to enable significantly improved compression performance relative to existing standards-in the range of 50% bit-rate reduction for equal perceptual video quality. This paper provides an overview of the technical features and characteristics of the HEVC standard.

/pdf/overview-of-the-high-efficiency-video-coding-hevc-standard-3nx6k0v703.pdf

Overview of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Standard

With the introduction of the H.264/AVC video coding standard, significant improvements have recently been demonstrated in video compression capability. The Joint Video Team of the ITU-T VCEG and the ISO/IEC MPEG has now also standardized a Scalable Video Coding (SVC) extension of the H.264/AVC standard. SVC enables the transmission and decoding of partial bit streams to provide video services with lower temporal or spatial resolutions or reduced fidelity while retaining a reconstruction quality that is high relative to the rate of the partial bit streams. Hence, SVC provides functionalities such as graceful degradation in lossy transmission environments as well as bit rate, format, and power adaptation. These functionalities provide enhancements to transmission and storage applications. SVC has achieved significant improvements in coding efficiency with an increased degree of supported scalability relative to the scalable profiles of prior video coding standards. This paper provides an overview of the basic concepts for extending H.264/AVC towards SVC. Moreover, the basic tools for providing temporal, spatial, and quality scalability are described in detail and experimentally analyzed regarding their efficiency and complexity.

/pdf/overview-of-the-scalable-video-coding-extension-of-the-h-264-2z9xwk2g93.pdf

Overview of the Scalable Video Coding Extension of the H.264/AVC Standard

This paper presents and characterizes the Princeton Application Repository for Shared-Memory Computers (PARSEC), a benchmark suite for studies of Chip-Multiprocessors (CMPs). Previous available benchmarks for multiprocessors have focused on high-performance computing applications and used a limited number of synchronization methods. PARSEC includes emerging applications in recognition, mining and synthesis (RMS) as well as systems applications which mimic large-scale multithreaded commercial programs. Our characterization shows that the benchmark suite covers a wide spectrum of working sets, locality, data sharing, synchronization and off-chip traffic. The benchmark suite has been made available to the public.

/pdf/the-parsec-benchmark-suite-characterization-and-jiajft2rem.pdf

The PARSEC benchmark suite: characterization and architectural implications

/pdf/the-scalable-video-coding-extension-of-the-h-264-avc-2pf4w9upmi.pdf

The Scalable Video Coding Extension of the H.264/AVC Standard

A unified approach to the coder control of video coding standards such as MPEG-2, H.263, MPEG-4, and the draft video coding standard H.264/AVC (advanced video coding) is presented. The performance of the various standards is compared by means of PSNR and subjective testing results. The results indicate that H.264/AVC compliant encoders typically achieve essentially the same reproduction quality as encoders that are compliant with the previous standards while typically requiring 60% or less of the bit rate.

/pdf/rate-constrained-coder-control-and-comparison-of-video-5fwgpj0vxg.pdf

Rate-constrained coder control and comparison of video coding standards

H.264/AVC is newest video coding standard of the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group and the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group. The main goals of the H.264/AVC standardization effort have been enhanced compression performance and provision of a "network-friendly" video representation addressing "conversational" (video telephony) and "nonconversational" (storage, broadcast, or streaming) applications. H.264/AVC has achieved a significant improvement in rate-distortion efficiency relative to existing standards. This article provides an overview of the technical features of H.264/AVC, describes profiles and applications for the standard, and outlines the history of the standardization process.

/pdf/overview-of-the-h-264-avc-video-coding-standard-4wlxplmuzt.pdf

Overview of the H.264/AVC video coding standard

H.264/MPEG-4 AVC is the latest coding standard jointly developed by the Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) of ITU-T and Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) of ISO/IEC. It uses state of the art coding tools and provides enhanced coding efficiency for a wide range of applications including video telephony, video conferencing, TV, storage (DVD and/or hard disk based), streaming video, digital video creation, digital cinema and others. In this paper an overview of this standard is provided. Some comparisons with the existing standards, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 Part 2, are also provided.

H264/MPEG-4 AVC is the latest international video coding standard It was jointly developed by the Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) of the ITU-T and the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) of ISO/IEC It uses state-of-the-art coding tools and provides enhanced coding efficiency for a wide range of applications, including video telephony, video conferencing, TV, storage (DVD and/or hard disk based, especially high-definition DVD), streaming video, digital video authoring, digital cinema, and many others The work on a new set of extensions to this standard has recently been completed These extensions, known as the Fidelity Range Extensions (FRExt), provide a number of enhanced capabilities relative to the base specification as approved in the Spring of 2003 In this paper, an overview of this standard is provided, including the highlights of the capabilities of the new FRExt features Some comparisons with the existing MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 Part 2 standards are also provided

https://fastvdo.com/spie04/spie04-h264OverviewPaper.pdf

The H.264/AVC Advanced Video Coding Standard: Overview and Introduction to the Fidelity Range Extensions

H.264/MPEG-4 AVC is a recently completed video compression standard jointly developed by the ITU-T VCEG and the ISO/IEC MPEG standards committees. The standard promises much higher compression than that possible with earlier standards. It allows coding of non-interlaced and interlaced video very efficiently, and even at high bit rates provides more acceptable visual quality than earlier standards. Further, the standard supports flexibilities in coding as well as organization of coded data that can increase resilience to errors or losses. As might be expected, the increase in coding efficiency and coding flexibility comes at the expense of an increase in complexity with respect to earlier standards. In this paper, we first briefly introduce the video coding tools that the standard supports and how these tools are organized into profiles. As with earlier standards, the mechanism of profiles allows one to implement only a desired subset of the standard and still be interoperable with applications of interest. Next, we discuss how the various video coding tools of the standard work, as well as the related issue of how to perform encoding using these tools. We then evaluate the coding performance in terms of contribution to overall improvement offered by individual tools, options within these tools, and important combinations of tools, on a representative set of video test sequences and movie clips. Next, we discuss a number of additional elements of the standard such as, tools that provide system support, details of levels of profiles, and the issue of encoder and decoder complexity. Finally, we summarize our overview and analysis of this standard, by identifying, based on their performance, promising tools as well as options within various tools. r 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Video coding using the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC compression standard

A motion estimation and compensation technique is provided for interlaced digital video such as video object planes (VOPs). Predictor motion vectors for use in differentially encoding a current field coded macroblock are obtained using the median of motion vectors of surrounding blocks or macroblocks. When a surrounding macroblock is itself interlaced coded, an average motion vector for that macroblock is used, with fractional pixel values being mapped to the half-pixel. When the current block is not interlaced coded but a surrounding block is, the field motion vectors may be used individually or averaged. In a repetitive padding technique for an interlaced coded VOP, the even and odd lines of the VOP and surrounding block are grouped. Within each field, exterior pixels are padded by setting them to the value of the nearest boundary pixel, or to an average of two boundary pixels. The lines are then reordered to provide a single padded reference VOP image.

Ajay Luthra

Papers

Overview of the H.264/AVC video coding standard

Overview of the H.264/AVC video coding standard

The H.264/AVC Advanced Video Coding Standard: Overview and Introduction to the Fidelity Range Extensions

Video coding using the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC compression standard

Motion estimation and compensation of video object planes for interlaced digital video