HEVC vs. H.264/AVC Standard Approach to Coder’s Performance Evaluation

The H.264/AVC standard achieves much higher coding efficiency than the H.263, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 standard, due to its improved inter and intra-prediction modes at the expense of higher computation complexity. Throughout the evolution of video coding standards, continued efforts have been made to maximize compression capability and improve other characteristics such as data loss robustness, while considering the practical computational resources. On the other hand, High Efficient Video Coding (HEVC) standard can provide a significant amount of increased coding efficiency compared to previous H.264/AVC standard. The features of the new design provide approximately a 50% bit-rate savings for equivalent perceptual quality relative to the performance of prior standard (especially for a high-resolution video). In order to compare the performance and complexity without significant rate-distortion performance degradation, the two different HEVC coders vs. H.264/AVC coder are tested for the fixed Quantization Parameter (QP) value, when Main profile, appropriate motion vector (MV) search ranges and IPPP structures are used. Simulation results have shown that the bit-rate was reduced over 50%, while the encoding time saving is slightly decreased up to 16% depending on the tested video sequence, when reference HEVC software’s HM-14.0 and HM-15.0 are compared to reference H.264/AVC software JM 18.6. However, there was negligible loss in term Signal-toNoise Ratio (SNR). Key-Words: H.264/AVC standard, HEVC standard, Encoding time saving, Signal-to-noise ratio, Bit-rate