Performance Analysis of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Relative to H.264 AVC

According to recent forecast, mobile video will generate over 69 percent of global mobile data traffic by 2018. Due to this the liability on video service providers to match the video quality expectations of the end user has increased. The goal of video coding is to ensure good video quality within the provision of transmission and storage. Bit rates, distortion and complexity are factors that reflect success of a video coding scheme. These factors are usually measured by bits per pixel, Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and computational time respectively. With the ever increasing demand for high efficiency video, several different video coding standards have been developed. H.264/MPEG-4 part 10 AVC is the most widely used video coding standard for streaming videos, mobile/handheld applications, HDTV broadcasting etc. High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the newest video coding standard. It provides higher coding performance than previous state–of-the-art video coding standard H.264/AVC. This paper provides an overview of video quality measurement techniques and various video coding standards. Analysis of the HEVC has been carried out by using objective video quality metrics like PSNR, SSIM, and MS-SSIM for QCIF and CIF resolution videos. The compression performance improved in HEVC relative to existing H.264 AVC standard is around 46% in terms of bit-rate reduction for nearly equivalent objective video quality.