HEVC Efficiency Assessment for Contribution Services of HD Interlaced Content

In April 2014 a new family of HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) profiles named “Range Extensions” has been approved in order to cover the needs of high-quality production environments, such as primary distribution, contribution services, and editing/post-production. HEVC Range Extensions support the 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 chroma subsampling formats and pixel depths beyond 10-bit, using the same coding tools as the first version of HEVC. — The new “Main 422@10” HEVC profile will become the successor of the successful “High 422” profile of the H.264/AVC standard, achieving a high efficiency for emerging formats beyond HD, such as the 4k and 8k formats. However HD interlaced content is nowadays the mainstream for broadcasting production, but HEVC profiles do not include specific tools for interlaced content as H.264/AVC did. — This paper addresses the issues involved in HD interlaced contribution services under the HEVC Main 422@10 profile, with the aim to identify its real HEVC efficiency in comparison to the Hi422P profile of H.264/AVC. The simulation results will report the bandwidth saving and other quality improvements that broadcasters and network operators can achieve for HD interlacing encoding using the new HEVC profiles.

Published

2014-10

Content type

Original Research

Keywords

HEVC, Main 422 10 Profile, High 422 Profile, Interlaced Content, Contribution Services, High Definition, Sequence Adaptive Field Frame, Compression Efficiency

DOI

10.5594/M001554

ISBN

978-1-61482-954-6