New Generation of Contribution Services Using HEVC 422 Profile

This paper addresses the performance of the new Range Extensions profile of HEVC standard for professional UHDTV contribution services, where 4:2:2 color format, a bit depth of 10-bits, and high bit rates are required in order to achieve excellent video quality. — With the aim to carry out a neutral technology comparison for the 4k format, we have conducted some simulations using the HM reference software of HEVC, under the new “Main 422 10-bits” profile, and JM reference software of H.264 under the “High 422”” profile. The experiment results show that for the same objective quality obtained by H.264, HEVC can achieve a bit rate saving in the range of 30% to 50%, reaching the best performance for the most complex sequences. — We have repeated the experiment to gather the HEVC robustness in a cascaded encoding-decoding 4K contribution scenario, implementing a new HEVC simulation with two re-encoding stages. The results reveal that the average quality losses for second generation are really low, around 0.3dB, but the bit rate penalty is over 20%. These results can help network operators and broadcasters to estimate efficiently the bandwidth services.

Published

2013-10

Content type

Original Research

Keywords

HEVC, Range Extensions, H.264, High 422 Profile, contribution services, Ultra High Definition, 4k, compression efficiency

DOI

10.5594/M001517

ISBN

978-1-61482-953-9