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.

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Overview of the H.264/AVC video coding standard

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.

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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.

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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.

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The PARSEC benchmark suite: characterization and architectural implications

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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.

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Rate-constrained coder control and comparison of video coding standards

The rate-distortion efficiency of video compression schemes is based on a sophisticated interaction between various motion representation possibilities, waveform coding of differences, and waveform coding of various refreshed regions. Hence, a key problem in high-compression video coding is the operational control of the encoder. This problem is compounded by the widely varying content and motion found in typical video sequences, necessitating the selection between different representation possibilities with varying rate-distortion efficiency. This article addresses the problem of video encoder optimization and discusses its consequences on the compression architecture of the overall coding system. Based on the well-known hybrid video coding structure, Lagrangian optimization techniques are presented that try to answer the question: what part of the video signal should be coded using what method and parameter settings?.

Rate-distortion optimization for video compression

The compression capability of several generations of video coding standards is compared by means of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and subjective testing results. A unified approach is applied to the analysis of designs, including H.262/MPEG-2 Video, H.263, MPEG-4 Visual, H.264/MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding (AVC), and High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). The results of subjective tests for WVGA and HD sequences indicate that HEVC encoders can achieve equivalent subjective reproduction quality as encoders that conform to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC when using approximately 50% less bit rate on average. The HEVC design is shown to be especially effective for low bit rates, high-resolution video content, and low-delay communication applications. The measured subjective improvement somewhat exceeds the improvement measured by the PSNR metric.

http://amalia.img.lx.it.pt/~fp/cav/Additional_material/HEVC-Performance.pdf

Gary J. Sullivan

Papers

Overview of the H.264/AVC video coding standard

Overview of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Standard

Rate-constrained coder control and comparison of video coding standards

Rate-distortion optimization for video compression

Comparison of the Coding Efficiency of Video Coding Standards—Including High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC)