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A screen content coding (SCC) extension to High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is currently under development by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding, which is a joint effort from the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group and the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group. The main goal of the HEVC-SCC standardization effort is to enable significantly improved compression performance for videos containing a substantial amount of still or moving rendered graphics, text, and animation rather than, or in addition to, camera-captured content. This paper provides an overview of the technical features and characteristics of the current HEVC-SCC test model and related coding tools, including intra-block copy, palette mode, adaptive color transform, and adaptive motion vector resolution. The performance of the SCC extension is compared against existing standards in terms of bitrate savings at equal distortion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Screen content coding plays an important role in many applications. Conventional reference picture management (RPM) strategies developed for natural content may not work well for screen content. This is because many regions in screen content remain static for a long time, causing a lot of repetitive contents to stay in the decoded picture buffer. The repetitive contents are not conducive to inter prediction, but still occupy valuable memory. This paper proposes a diversity-based RPM scheme for screen content coding. The concept of diversity is introduced for the reference picture set (RPS) to help formulate the RPM problem. By maximizing the diversity of RPS, more potentially better predictions are provided. Better compression performance can then be achieved. Meanwhile, the proposed scheme is nonnormative and compatible with existing video coding standards, such as High Efficiency Video Coding. The experimental results show that, for low delay screen content coding, the bit saving of the proposed scheme is 4.9% on average and up to 13.7%, without increasing encoding time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike camera-captured video, screen content (SC) often contains a lot of repeating patterns, which makes some blocks used as references much more important than others. However, conventional rate-distortion optimization (RDO) schemes in video coding do not consider the dependence among image blocks, which often leads to a locally optimal parameter selection, especially for SC. In this paper, we present a weighted RDO scheme for SC coding (SCC), in which the repeating characteristics are taken into account when deciding RD tradeoff for each block. For one block, the number being referenced by the current picture and following pictures is estimated and based on the number, we set a proper weight in the RDO process to reflect its importance from a global point of view. To estimate the number being referenced, we propose a hash-based method to approximate the results to avoid the complexity of direct search. Experimental results show that compared with the High Efficiency Video Coding SCC reference software, 10.1%, 14.5%, and 2.2% on average and up to 25.7%, 39.8%, and 4.6% bit saving can be achieved by considering weights provided by our scheme for hierarchical-B, IBBB, and all intra coding structures, respectively. Thanks to our hash-based design, the complexity increase brought by the proposed scheme is marginal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the latest High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) development, i.e., HEVC screen content coding extensions (HEVC-SCC), a hash-based inter-motion search/block matching scheme is adopted in the reference test model, which brings significant coding gains to code screen content. However, the hash table generation itself may take up to half the encoding time and is thus too complex for practical usage. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical hash design and the corresponding block matching scheme to significantly reduce the complexity of hash-based block matching. The hierarchical structure in the proposed scheme allows large block calculation to use the results of small blocks. Thus, we avoid redundant computation among blocks with different sizes, which greatly reduces complexity without compromising coding efficiency. The experimental results show that compared with the hash-based block matching scheme in the HEVC-SCC test model (SCM)-6.0, the proposed scheme reduces about 77% of hash processing time, which leads to 12% and 16% encoding time savings in random access (RA) and low-delay B coding structures. The proposed scheme has been adopted into the latest SCM. A parallel implementation of the proposed hash table generation on graphics processing unit (GPU) is also presented to show the high parallelism of the proposed scheme, which achieves more than 30 frames/s for 1080p sequences and 60 frames/s for 720p sequences. With the fast hash-based block matching integrated into x265 and the hash table generated on GPU, the encoder can achieve 11.8% and 14.0% coding gains on average for RA and low-delay P coding structures, respectively, for real-time encoding. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Range Extensions (RExt) of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard have recently been approved by both ITU-T and ISO/IEC. This set of extensions targets video coding applications in areas including content acquisition, postproduction, contribution, distribution, archiving, medical imaging, still imaging, and screen content. In addition to the functionality of HEVC Version 1, RExt provide support for monochrome, 4:2:2, and 4:4:4 chroma sampling formats as well as increased sample bit depths beyond 10 bits per sample. This extended functionality includes new coding tools with a view to provide additional coding efficiency, greater flexibility, and throughput at high bit depths/rates. Improved lossless, near-lossless, and very high bit-rate coding is also a part of the RExt scope. This paper presents the technical aspects of HEVC RExt, including a discussion of RExt profiles, tools, applications, and provides experimental results for a performance comparison with previous relevant coding technology. When compared with the High 4:4:4 Predictive Profile of H.264/Advanced Video Coding (AVC), the corresponding HEVC 4:4:4 RExt profile provides up to $\sim 25$ %, $\sim 32$ %, and $\sim 36$ % average bit-rate reduction at the same PSNR quality level for intra, random access, and low delay configurations, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]