Developments in International Video Coding Standardization After AVC, With an Overview of Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

Abstract

In the last 17 years, since the finalization of the first version of the now-dominant H.264/Moving Picture Experts Group-4 (MPEG-4) Advanced Video Coding (AVC) standard in 2003, two major new generations of video coding standards have been developed. These include the standards known as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) and Versatile Video Coding (VVC). HEVC was finalized in 2013, repeating the ten-year cycle time set by its predecessor and providing about 50% bit-rate reduction over AVC. The cycle was shortened by three years for the VVC project, which was finalized in July 2020, yet again achieving about a 50% bit-rate reduction over its predecessor (HEVC). This article summarizes these developments in video coding standardization after AVC. It especially focuses on providing an overview of the first version of VVC, including comparisons against HEVC. Besides further advances in hybrid video compression, as in previous development cycles, the broad versatility of the application domain that is

A Trellis Based Temporal Rate Allocation and Virtual Reference Frames for High Efficiency Video Coding

“…Compared to the prior inter-coding tools of the H.264/AVC standard [2], the HEVC introduces several improvements in coding tools and coding structure, notably (i) block partitioning and (ii) motion estimation and reference picture management.…”

“…The wide growth of multimedia applications always demands more powerful video transmission over the internet with high compression performance as well as low complexity. Therefore, the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) announced the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) [1] with 50% bitrate reduction at the same perceptual quality as the previous H.264/AVC standard [2]. Despite its success, there is still a demand for beyond HEVC coding to meet emerging requirements of higher resolutions (i.e., 4K, 8K) and diverse contents (screen contents, drone, etc.).…”

“…In this context, in the newest video compression standard, H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC), many coding tools have been proposed, such as partitioning with quad-tree plus binary, adaptive transforms, new intra modes, affine motion estimation, dependent quantization, etc. [2]. Among all, inter coding tools are always bringing the highest bitrate reduction due to the high redundancy between consecutive temporal frames.…”

“…Adaptive approaches are complicated and demand computational complexity and memory for either pre-analysis or online analysis. As a result, the common test condition of the most recent video coding standards, including H.266/VVC, still favors a simple hierarchical rate allocation at the frame level [2]. For each GOP, HEVC and VVC classified frames into a temporal index (Tid), and depending on their hierarchical location and frame types (i.e., intra or inter), the quantized parameter (QP) is adjusted by a fixed value.…”

A Complexity Reduction Method for VVC Intra Prediction Based on Statistical Analysis and SAE-CNN

“…The main reason is that a more flexible QTMT structure of block partition was adopted in VVC; that is, the horizontal binary-tree, vertical binary-tree, horizontal trinomial-tree and vertical trinomial-tree structure were added on the basis of the quad-tree structure, as shown in Figure 1. Due to the characteristics of the QTMT structure, the encoder can make more flexible divisions for CUs with different texture complexities, thereby improving coding performance [6].…”