HEVC vs. H.264/AVC Through Performance and Complexity Comparison

The main goal of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standardization effort was to enable significantly improved compression performance relative to existing standards-in the range of 50% bit-rate reduction for equal perceptual video quality. In order to compare the performance and complexity without significant rate-distortion performance degradation, the HEVC coder vs. H.264/AVC coder are tested for the fixed Quantization Parameter (QP) value, when Main profile, appropriate motion vector (MV) search ranges and hierarchical B pictures are used. Simulation results have shown that the bit-rate is reduced up to 50%, while the encoding time saving is reached over 70% depending on the tested video sequence, when reference HEVC software HM-15.0 is compared to reference H.264/AVC software JM 18.6. However, there was negligible loss in term Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR). Key-Words: H.264/AVC standard, HEVC standard, Encoding time saving, Signal-to-Noise ratio, Bit-rate reduction.