MPEG-5 EVC

Jonatan Samuelsson, Kiho Choi, Jianle Chen, Dmytro Rusanovskyy

The MPEG standardization group has produced a large number of standards for video compression over the last three decades. Traditionally, the MPEG standards have either focused on highest available compression efficiency (e.g. MPEG-2, AVC and HEVC) or a desire to produce a royalty-free standard (e.g. IVC and WebVC). In January 2019, MPEG embarked on a new standardization project that can be said to be a hybrid of the two; MPEG-5 Essential Video Coding (EVC). The MPEG-5 EVC standard is being developed with a royalty-free Baseline profile at its base and a royalty bearing Main profile that provides excellent compression performance. The Main profile adds on top of the Baseline profile, 20 different coding tools that each can be individually turned off and, when needed, replaced by a corresponding Baseline profile tool. This structure makes it easy to fall back to a smaller set off tools in the future, if for example licensing complications occur around a specific tool, without breaking compatibility with already deployed decoders.

Published
2019-10
Content type
Original Research
Keywords
Video coding, video compression, Essential Video Coding (EVC), Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), next-generation video codecs
DOI
10.5594/M001877