Performance Analysis of Video Coding Schemes with Reference to Intra-Coded High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC)

Abstract

Compression efficiency of a video codec is very important to enable it to encode high quality videos at low bitrates while keeping its quality similar to the original video. Significant progress has been made in the area of video encoding. The latest state of the art video encoding standard, High Efficiency Video Coding – HEVC/H.265 doubles the video quality for the same bitrate compared to other codecs. To evaluate the performance efficiency of HEVC, this paper evaluates video quality and computational efficiency performance comparison amongst H.265, H.264 and Motion JPEG. Alongside the need for high compression efficiency, it is also important to consider the computational complexity of the video codecs. It is concluded that, although HEVC provides the best compression efficiency, it does so at the expense of significantly more computational cost than H.264. The conducted experiments show that HEVC results in the best PSNR performance of the encoded video sequence followed by H.264. However, in terms of coding efficiency Motion JPEG while employing its Kakadu implementation resulted in fastest encoding times followed by HEVC. Videos encoded with Motion JPEG using OpenJPEG library produced the worst PSNR performance. H.264 resulted in the worst computational efficiency and the produced video quality performance was comparable to that of Motion JPEG. This work is meant to provide insights regarding the performance comparison of the video encoding suites and future developments of the codecs