HEVC Efficiency Assessment for Contribution Services of HD Interlaced Content

In April 2014 a new family of high-efficiency video coding (HEVC) profiles named “range extensions” was approved in order to cover the needs of high-quality production environments, such as primary distribution, contribution services, and editing/post-production.1 HEVC range extensions support the 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 chroma subsampling formats and pixel depths beyond 10 bits, 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/advanced video coding (AVC) standard, achieving a high efficiency for emerging formats beyond high definition (HD), such as the 4K and 8K formats.2 HD interlaced content is currently 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 High 422P profile of H.264/AVC. The simulation results will report the bandwidth savings and other quality improvements that broadcasters and network operators can achieve for HD interlacing encoding using the new HEVC profiles.

Print ISSN

1545-0279

Electronic ISSN

2160-2492

Published

2015-10

Content type

Original Research

Keywords

HEVC, Main 422 profile, Sequence Adaptive Field Frame, interlaced content, contribution services, archiving

DOI

10.5594/j18618