Introduction to the High-Efficiency Video Coding Standard

The high-efficiency video coding （HEVC） standard is the newest video coding standard currently under joint development by ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group （VCEG） and ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group （MPEG）. HEVC is the next-generation video coding standard after H.264/AVC. The goals of the HEVC standardization effort are to double the video coding efficiency of existing H.264/AVC while supporting all the recognized potential applications, such as, video telephony, storage, broadcast, streaming, especially for large picture size video （4k x 2k）. The HEVC standard will be completed as an ISO/iEC and ITU-T standard in January 2013. in February 2012, the HEVC standardization process reached its committee draft （CD） stage. The ever-improving HEVC standard has demonstrated a significant gain in coding efficiency in rate-distortion efficiency relative to the existing H.264/AVC. This paper provides an overview of the technical features of HEVC close to HEVC CD stage, covering high-level structure, coding units, prediction units, transform units, spatial signal transformation and PCM representation, intra-picture prediction, inter-picture prediction, entropy coding and in-loop filtering. The HEVC coding efficiency performances comparing with H.264/AVC are also provided.