Evaluation of the next generation high-efficiency video coding standard

Abstract

Digital video has become very important and is present in many applications, including video conferencing, video games, DVDs and broadcast television. Digital video cannot be stored in uncompressed form as it would take up too much of our valuable storage, therefore lossy digital video compression is often employed to deliver the digital video the user sees. Lossy digital video encoders try to compromise between bit rate and quality. One of the most commonly used video compression standards is the H.264 which was the best standard until January 2013. Recent advances in compression techniques have led to the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard which promises a reduced bit rate of 50% while giving us the same visual quality we are accustomed to. This thesis performs experiments on both H.264 and HEVC to test this proposal that video coders promised us. H.264 is very similar to HEVC in the fact that they are both hybrid coders that use motion compensation. HEVC has some new tools however; new SAO filter, capability of 64x64 macroblocks and improved entropy and transform coding. The quality of the video produced was measured using two full-reference (FR) metrics: peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM). 16 different video sequences with different resolutions were used to obtain a large range of data. HEVC wins in almost all aspects, especially video sequences with high resolutions at low data rates), except for the time taken which is thousands of seconds more than H.264.