HEVC Complexity and Implementation Analysis

TLDR

Video compression advances driven by increasing processing power led to HEVC, which promises to double coding efficiency over H.264/AVC by delivering the same quality at half the bit rate. The paper describes the complexity‑related aspects considered during HEVC standardization. The authors profiled reference and optimized HEVC software to identify where it is more or less complex than earlier standards. HEVC decoders have comparable complexity to H.264/AVC decoders, making software decoding practical, while encoders are several times more complex and will be a focus of future research.

Abstract

Advances in video compression technology have been driven by ever-increasing processing power available in software and hardware. The emerging High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard aims to provide a doubling in coding efficiency with respect to the H.264/AVC high profile, delivering the same video quality at half the bit rate. In this paper, complexity-related aspects that were considered in the standardization process are described. Furthermore, profiling of reference software and optimized software gives an indication of where HEVC may be more complex than its predecessors and where it may be simpler. Overall, the complexity of HEVC decoders does not appear to be significantly different from that of H.264/AVC decoders; this makes HEVC decoding in software very practical on current hardware. HEVC encoders are expected to be several times more complex than H.264/AVC encoders and will be a subject of research in years to come.