The New High-Efficiency Video Coding Standard
Recent developments in camera and display technologies are supporting increasingly larger resolutions. At the same time, studies predict that the share of video data in overall consumer Internet traffic will become larger than 75%. These developments require a more efficient coding of digital video than the current video-coding standard H.264/ MPEG-4 AVC is capable of. The new High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard achieves this by introducing new coding tools as well as by improving techniques already known from H.264/MPEG- 4 AVC. Recent performance analyses comparing HEVC with H.264/MPEG-4 AVC High Profile show average bitrate reductions around 35 to 40% for a given objective quality while subjective test results indicate that a 50% bitrate reduction for a comparable visual quality can be achieved. Besides techniques for substantially improving coding efficiency, large efforts have been put on facilitating parallel encoding and decoding in HEVC. This article presents in detail all these different aspects of HEVC.