Video coding using the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC compression standard

• Published in: Signal processing. Image communication 2004-10, Vol.19 (9), p.793-849
• Main Authors: Puri, Atul, Chen, Xuemin, Luthra, Ajay
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: AVC; H.264; JVT; MPEG; MPEG-4; Video coding; Video compression
• ISSN: 0923-5965; 1879-2677
• DOI: 10.1016/j.image.2004.06.003

H.264/MPEG-4 AVC is a recently completed video compression standard jointly developed by the ITU-T VCEG and the ISO/IEC MPEG standards committees. The standard promises much higher compression than that possible with earlier standards. It allows coding of non-interlaced and interlaced video very efficiently, and even at high bit rates provides more acceptable visual quality than earlier standards. Further, the standard supports flexibilities in coding as well as organization of coded data that can increase resilience to errors or losses. As might be expected, the increase in coding efficiency and coding flexibility comes at the expense of an increase in complexity with respect to earlier standards. In this paper, we first briefly introduce the video coding tools that the standard supports and how these tools are organized into profiles. As with earlier standards, the mechanism of profiles allows one to implement only a desired subset of the standard and still be interoperable with applications of interest. Next, we discuss how the various video coding tools of the standard work, as well as the related issue of how to perform encoding using these tools. We then evaluate the coding performance in terms of contribution to overall improvement offered by individual tools, options within these tools, and important combinations of tools, on a representative set of video test sequences and movie clips. Next, we discuss a number of additional elements of the standard such as, tools that provide system support, details of levels of profiles, and the issue of encoder and decoder complexity. Finally, we summarize our overview and analysis of this standard, by identifying, based on their performance, promising tools as well as options within various tools.