Special Section on the Joint Call for Proposals on High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Standardization

Special Section on the Joint Call for Proposals on High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Standardization THE FIRST commercially successful digital video compression standard emerged 20 years ago in the form of Recommendation ITU-T H.261. MPEG-1 and H.262/MPEG2 video (the latter was jointly standardized by ITU-T and ISO/IEC) were then developed very soon thereafter, and they resulted in an explosion of products and services that created consumer video technology as we know it today. Each international video coding standard has been built on a foundation of knowledge from the preceding generation, and has enabled an expanding array of product offerings and design improvements, as video support spread into a more diversified set of applications—particularly including Internet streaming and personal videotelephony, among others. More recently, the last major step forward in video compression capability for world-wide use across a broad variety of applications was the creation of the H.264/MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding (AVC) standard [1]–[4]. In particular, it was the 2004 development of the Fidelity Range Extensions of that standard that included the specification of the increasingly-dominant feature set known as the High Profile of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC [4]. H.264/MPEG-4 AVC was developed jointly by ITU-T and ISO/IEC experts, and is published as both ITU-T Rec. H.264 and ISO/IEC 14496-10. It has become the primary format in use for essentially all video applications (and video applications are becoming a majority of network traffic world-wide). As time has moved forward, video content has continued to become an increasing presence in our lives, with an evergrowing diversification of usage models and ever-increasing demands for higher quality. Yesterday’s TV switched over to digital content delivery and was rapidly surpassed in quality as DVD and HDTV emerged, and now DVD itself has started to decline as Blu-ray, HD video-on-demand, and Internet delivery have surpassed it with better balances of quality and convenience. Boxy standard-definition interlaced CRT displays have disappeared and been replaced by flat panels of ever-increasing size and image resolution. Moreover, video conferencing has evolved from special-purpose communication links and expensive conference room systems to Internet-based communications using home and office-based PCs, ubiquitous wallmounted displays, and an expanding variety of mobile devices.