Detlev Marpe

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

Context-based adaptive binary arithmetic coding in the H.264/AVC video compression standard

Context-based adaptive binary arithmetic coding (CABAC) as a normative part of the new ITU-T/ISO/IEC standard H.264/AVC for video compression is presented. By combining an adaptive binary arithmetic coding technique with context modeling, a high degree of adaptation and redundancy reduction is achieved. The CABAC framework also includes a novel low-complexity method for binary arithmetic coding and probability estimation that is well suited for efficient hardware and software implementations. CABAC significantly outperforms the baseline entropy coding method of H.264/AVC for the typical area of envisaged target applications. For a set of test sequences representing typical material used in broadcast applications and for a range of acceptable video quality of about 30 to 38 dB, average bit-rate savings of 9%-14% are achieved.

Video coding with H.264/AVC: tools, performance, and complexity

H.264/AVC, the result of the collaboration between the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group and the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group, is the latest standard for video coding. The goals of this standardization effort were enhanced compression efficiency, network friendly video representation for interactive (video telephony) and non-interactive applications (broadcast, streaming, storage, video on demand). H.264/AVC provides gains in compression efficiency of up to 50% over a wide range of bit rates and video resolutions compared to previous standards. Compared to previous standards, the decoder complexity is about four times that of MPEG-2 and two times that of MPEG-4 Visual Simple Profile. This paper provides an overview of the new tools, features and complexity of H.264/AVC.

The H.264/MPEG4 advanced video coding standard and its applications

H.264/MPEG4-AVC is the latest video coding standard of the ITU-T video coding experts group (VCEG) and the ISO/IEC moving picture experts group (MPEG). H.264/MPEG4-AVC has recently become the most widely accepted video coding standard since the deployment of MPEG2 at the dawn of digital television, and it may soon overtake MPEG2 in common use. It covers all common video applications ranging from mobile services and videoconferencing to IPTV, HDTV, and HD video storage. This article discusses the technology behind the new H.264/MPEG4-AVC standard, focusing on the main distinct features of its core coding technology and its first set of extensions, known as the fidelity range extensions (FRExt). In addition, this article also discusses the current status of adoption and deployment of the new standard in various application areas

Analysis of Hierarchical B Pictures and MCTF

In this paper, an investigation of H.264/MPEG4-AVC conforming coding with hierarchical B pictures is presented. We analyze the coding delay and memory requirements, describe details of an improved encoder control, and compare the coding efficiency for different coding delays. Additionally, the coding efficiency of hierarchical B picture coding is compared to that of MCTF-based coding by using identical coding structures and a similar degree of encoder optimization. Our simulation results turned out that in comparison to the widely used IBBP...structure coding gains of more than 1 dB can be achieved at the expense of an increased coding delay. Further experiments have shown that the coding efficiency gains obtained by using the additional update steps in MCTF coding are generally smaller than the losses resulting from the required open-loop encoder control

3D High-Efficiency Video Coding for Multi-View Video and Depth Data

This paper describes an extension of the high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard for coding of multi-view video and depth data. In addition to the known concept of disparity-compensated prediction, inter-view motion parameter, and inter-view residual prediction for coding of the dependent video views are developed and integrated. Furthermore, for depth coding, new intra coding modes, a modified motion compensation and motion vector coding as well as the concept of motion parameter inheritance are part of the HEVC extension. A novel encoder control uses view synthesis optimization, which guarantees that high quality intermediate views can be generated based on the decoded data. The bitstream format supports the extraction of partial bitstreams, so that conventional 2D video, stereo video, and the full multi-view video plus depth format can be decoded from a single bitstream. Objective and subjective results are presented, demonstrating that the proposed approach provides 50% bit rate savings in comparison with HEVC simulcast and 20% in comparison with a straightforward multi-view extension of HEVC without the newly developed coding tools.

Overview of the Scalable H.264/MPEG4-AVC Extension

The scalable extension of H.264/MPEG4-AVC is a current standardization project of the joint video team of the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group and the ISO/IEC moving picture experts group. This paper gives an overview of the design of the scalable H.264/MPEG4-AVC extension and describes the basic concepts for supporting temporal, spatial, and SNR scalability. The efficiency of the described concepts for providing spatial and SNR scalability is analyzed by means of simulation results and compared to H.264/MPEG4-AVC compliant single layer coding.

H.264/MPEG4-AVC fidelity range extensions: tools, profiles, performance, and application areas

The technical work on the first amendment of the H.264/MPEG4-AVC video coding standard has recently been completed. In these so-called fidelity range extensions (FRExt) a set of new coding tools is specified which is primarily targeted at providing significant improvements in coding efficiency for higher-fidelity video material. This paper presents an overview of the corresponding methods, briefly discusses some important aspects regarding profiles and applications, and finally provides experimental results for a performance comparison with existing coding technology.

Video Compression Using Nested Quadtree Structures, Leaf Merging, and Improved Techniques for Motion Representation and Entropy Coding

Abstract-A video coding architecture is described that is based on nested and pre-configurable quadtree structures for flexible and signal-adaptive picture partitioning. The primary goal of this partitioning concept is to provide a high degree of adaptability for both temporal and spatial prediction as well as for the purpose of space-frequency representation of prediction residuals. At the same time, a leaf merging mechanism is included in order to prevent excessive partitioning of a picture into prediction blocks and to reduce the amount of bits for signaling the prediction signal. For fractional-sample motion-compensated prediction, a fixed-point implementation of the maximal-order minimum-support algorithm is presented that uses a combination of infinite impulse response and FIR filtering. Entropy coding utilizes the concept of probability interval partitioning entropy codes that offers new ways for parallelization and enhanced throughput. The presented video coding scheme was submitted to a joint call for proposals of ITU-T Visual Coding Experts Group and ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group and was ranked among the five best performing proposals, both in terms of subjective and objective quality.

Block Merging for Quadtree-Based Partitioning in HEVC

The joint development of the upcoming High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard by ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group and ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group marks a new step in video compression capability. In technical terms, HEVC is a hybrid video-coding approach using quadtree-based block partitioning together with motion-compensated prediction. Even though a high degree of adaptability is achieved by quadtree-based block partitioning, this approach has certain intrinsic drawbacks, which may result in redundant sets of motion parameters being transmitted. Previous work has shown that those redundancies can effectively be removed by merging the leafs of a particular quadtree structure. Following this concept, a block merging algorithm for HEVC is now proposed. This algorithm generates a single motion parameter set for a whole region of contiguous motion-compensated blocks. In this paper, we describe the various components of the proposed block merging algorithm and, using experimental evidence, demonstrate their benefits in terms of coding efficiency.