Clinton Priddle

High Performance, Low Complexity Video Coding and the Emerging HEVC Standard

This paper describes a low complexity video codec with high coding efficiency. It was proposed to the high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standardization effort of moving picture experts group and video coding experts group, and has been partially adopted into the initial HEVC test model under consideration design. The proposal utilizes a quadtree-based coding structure with support for macroblocks of size 64 × 64, 32 × 32, and 16 × 16 pixels. Entropy coding is performed using a low complexity variable length coding scheme with improved context adaptation compared to the context adaptive variable length coding design in H.264/AVC. The proposals interpolation and deblocking filter designs improve coding efficiency, yet have low complexity. Finally, intra-picture coding methods have been improved to provide better subjective quality than H.264/AVC. The subjective quality of the proposed codec has been evaluated extensively within the HEVC project, with results indicating that similar visual quality to H.264/AVC High Profile anchors is achieved, measured by mean opinion score, using significantly fewer bits. Coding efficiency improvements are achieved with lower complexity than the H.264/AVC Baseline Profile, particularly suiting the proposal for high resolution, high quality applications in resource-constrained environments.

3GPP Mobile Multimedia Streaming Standards [Standards in a Nutshell]

Data rates offered by mobile networks are increasing, as are the capabilities of mobile devices. With this, mobile multimedia services are getting wider distribution. Traditional linear mobile TV services, where the viewer has to watch a scheduled TV program at the offered time, were initially dominating but other streaming services like Video on Demand, User-Generated Content (USG) services, or Internet streaming services are becoming more important. This article describes the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standards for mobile unicast multimedia streaming and how they are used in almost 200 mobile networks.

Low complexity video coding and the emerging HEVC standard

This paper describes a low complexity video codec with high coding efficiency. It was proposed to the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standardization effort of MPEG and VCEG, and has been partially adopted into the initial HEVC Test Model under Consideration design. The proposal utilizes a quad-tree structure with a support of large macroblocks of size 64×64 and 32×32, in addition to macroblocks of size 16×16. The entropy coding is done using a low complexity variable length coding based scheme with improved context adaptation over the H.264/AVC design. In addition, the proposal includes improved interpolation and deblocking filters, giving better coding efficiency while having low complexity. Finally, an improved intra coding method is presented. The subjective quality of the proposal is evaluated extensively and the results show that the proposed method achieves similar visual quality as H.264/AVC High Profile anchors with around 50% and 35% bit rate reduction for low delay and random-access experiments respectively at high definition sequences. This is achieved with less complexity than H.264/AVC Baseline Profile, making the proposal especially suitable for resource constrained environments.

Analysis of H.264/AVC Scalable Video Coding for Video Delivery to Heterogeneous Terminals

In 2007, the ITU-T H.264 | ISO/IEC MPEG-4 AVC standard was extended to support temporal, spatial and fidelity (SNR) scalability in a framework that is referred to as Scalable Video Coding (SVC). Since the development of this SVC extension, its use has been proposed for several applications. It seems however there is not yet a broadly agreed understanding about the benefits of SVC compared to non-scalable coding. In this paper, we describe coding efficiency gain and cost measures for scalable video against non-scalable simulcast, and single layer non-scalable coding, respectively, in the context of video delivery to heterogeneous terminals. Our results show that the cost and gain from SVC are strongly dependent on the application and conditions. Specifically, it is shown that while SVC can theoretically provide promising gain in some applications, its cost is not negligible and in some cases this cost can outweigh the gain.