Compression performance of high efficiency video coding (HEVC) working draft 4.

This paper presents the results of compression comparison tests between the current state of the emerging High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) draft standard and the current dominant standard H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (High Profile) as an anchor reference. The conditions used for the comparison tests were designed to reflect relevant application scenarios and to enable a fair comparison to the maximum extent feasible, i.e. using comparable quantization settings, reference frame buffering, etc. The testing was generally configured in favour of using a relatively strong H.264/MPEG-4 AVC anchor reference. Several of the encoder optimizations currently found in the HEVC software are tested and shown to be helpful to improve the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC anchor performance. When compared to the improved anchor encoder configurations, the HEVC draft design currently provides a bit rate savings for equal PSNR of about 39% for random access applications, 44% for low-delay use, and 25% for all-intra use. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]