Subjective quality evaluation of the upcoming HEVC video compression standard

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the latest attempt by ISO/MPEG and ITU-T/VCEG to define the next generation compression standard beyond H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 AVC. One of the major goals of HEVC is to provide efficient compression for resolutions beyond HDTV. However, the subjective evaluations that led to the selection of technologies were bound to HDTV resolution. Moreover, performance evaluation metrics to report efficiency results of this standard are mainly based on PSNR, especially for resolutions beyond HDTV. This paper provides subjective evaluation results to assess the performance of the current HEVC codec for resolutions beyond HDTV.