Introduction to HEVC / H265

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HEVC/H.265 Overview

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Overview
 Industry needs
 Large resolution support (4K, 8K)
 Friendliness for multi-core platforms (by built-in parallelization)
 Better Coding Efficiency
 High-contrast TV (10-bits per pixel and higher)
 Glassless (auto stereoscopic) 3D TV.
 Screen Content and Overlay graphics Coding (Games, synthetic
video)

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 Improve H.264/AVC coding efficiency by 50% or better
 Enhance parallelism
 Effective Coding for 10 bps and higher
 Enable graphics coding tools – not done yet
 Adapt for Auto-Stereoscopic TV (glassless TV) – not done
yet?
HEVC Goals

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HEVC History
 HEVC is a direct successor of H.264/AVC
 HEVC is a competitor of VP9
 Start: 2010
 MPEG & ITU-T VCEG established a Joint Collaborative Team to
specify HEVC
 Finish: January 2013 – HEVC is approved as a standard
 ISO/IEC 23008-2 High Efficiency Video Coding Standard
 ITU-T Rec. H.265 as a standard.

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HEVC - Features
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New Features
SAO – Sample Adaptive offset
Transform skip
In-Built Parallelism:
 Tiles - Frame Division to Separate Encodeable regions .
 WPP - Parallel Coding of Rows

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Simplification
 CABAC simplification
 De-blocking
 Interlace modes

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 CABAC
 reduce context coded bins
 group bypass coded bins
 group bins with the same context, reduce context
selection dependencies, …
 Deblocking:
 Simpler logic for enabling/disabling filtering across
edge
 Filtering on 8x8 grid
 Restricted interlace support
 No MBAFF
 No PAFF
Simplifications (details(

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Enhancements
 Larger Blocks
 Enhanced motion prediction
 Enhanced Intra prediction
 Enhanced Motion Compensation

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HEVC Enhancements
 Larger coding units up to 64x64
 Enhanced range of prediction unit (PU)
 from 4x4 to 64x64
 Enhanced range of transform unit (TU)
 from 4x4 to 32x32
 New Asymmetric prediction partitions
 32x8, 16x8, …
 Enhanced motion vector prediction:
competitive prediction instead of the H264 median
prediction

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HEVC Enhancements
 Enhanced direct /skip mode
 Additional candidates (up to 5)
 Enhanced Intra Prediction:
 35 modes instead of 9 in AVC/H.264
 Enhanced motion compensation:
 8-tap filter
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HEVC Status (Aug. 2014(
 HEVC Main (Main10) Profile finalized, performance is
already meeting or exceeding its goals
 Working on version 2 (Rext):
 Add YUV 4:2:2, 4:4:4
 Monochrome 12, 16 bits per pixel for medical imaging
 Working on scalability
 SHVC
 3D (MVC+depth, Multiview).
 JPEG and MPEG are developing a file format for the coding
of still images based on HEVC (HEVC Webp)

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HEVC Status (cont.)
* Taken from http://ngcodec.com/news/2014/1/12/current-status-of-hevch265-hardware-support

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HEVC Application
 Streaming
 Video conferencing
 HD Video Distribution to Mobile
 Wireless HDMI, Wi-Fi Display, WFD
 Broadcast 4K, 8K

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HEVC vs. H.264/AVC
 According to JCTVC-I0407 (KDDI), HEVC outperforms
H.264/AVC in PSNR metric
 21% on all-intra streams
 36% on random access streams
 43% on low-delay streams
 MOS tests conducted by InterDigital reveal bitrate saving
above 50% for wide bitrate range (from 380kbps to 1270
kbps).
 Research of NTT DOCOMO shows HEVC (version
HM5.0 HE) at half the bitrate looks comparable or better
than High Profile of H.264/AVC.

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Compression Bit-rate Trend

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AVC/H.264 vs. HEVC – Case Examples

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AVC/H.264 vs. HEVC – Case Examples

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AVC/H.264 vs. HEVC – Case Examples

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HEVC/H.265 Adaptation
Blu-Ray Disc Association (BDA) adopted HEVC/H.265:
HEVC/H.265 chosen as main codec for 4K Blu-Ray (optic disks, 50Gb):
 Resolution 3,820×2,160
 10 bits per pixel
 Bit-rate 50-60Mbps and higher
MPEG DASH adopted HEVC/H.265

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HEVC/H.265 Adaptation
 ffmpeg
 DivX Player: version 10.2.2
 MediaInfo: version 0.7.70 supports x265 library

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HEVC Open-source Codecs
Vendor Product Website License
JCT-VC HM https://hevc.hhi.fraunhofer.de/HM-doc/ BSD
MultiCoreWare x265 http://x265.org/ GPL 2
Vantrix f265 http://f265.org/ BSD
Tampere University
of Technology
Kvazaar https://github.com/ultravideo/kvazaar GPL 2
* All codecs are compiled in linux

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• Official JCT-VC site
http://phenix.it-sudparis.eu/jct/
• Recent text draft (after Geneva’s JCT-VC meeting, Jan. 2013):
http://phenix.int-evry.fr/jct/doc_end_user/current_document.php?id=7243
• JCT-VC forum
For subscribing go to the link:
http://mailman.rwth-aachen.de/mailman/options/jct-vc/
• Reference Model (HM) and Draft Bug Tracker:
https://hevc.hhi.fraunhofer.de/trac/hevc
This link contains a list of declared bugs in both HM and the spec.
• HEVC Documents Repository:
http://wftp3.itu.int/av-arch/jctvc-site/
This link contains all proposal and notes from the very first JCT-VC meeting.
• Testing HEVC streams:
ftp://ftp.kw.bbc.co.uk/hevc/
• HEVC Reference SW (HM)
https://hevc.hhi.fraunhofer.de/svn/svn_HEVCSoftware/tags/
Useful Links