Fringe benefits of the H.264/AVC

Abstract

H.264/AVC is the newest, state-of-the-art, video compression standard. Recently adopted, it leads to substantial performance improvement compared to other existing standards. In this paper we want to explore less known features of the H.264/AVC that were not the main intent of the standard. We begin by showing a few comparisons as examples of how the H.264/AVC outperforms other coders. Nevertheless, along with better video compression, the H.264/AVC brought us a few unexpected bonuses. H.264/AVC's intra-frame coder is so efficient that we can make it operate as a still image coder that outperforms the existing state-of-the-art still image compression standard (JPEG-2000). For that to work, one has to operate the H.264/AVC in intra frame and compress a single frame. Many results are shown comparing it with JPEG-2000 for still image compression. In effect, the intra-frame prediction mode is so efficient that interframe prediction can be simplified if necessary. We will show that one can turn off motion estimation and yet H.264/AVC can outperform MPEG-2. For that, we simply set all motion vectors to be zero. The interframe prediction is made to "compete" with the intraframe predictions. Results are presented to demonstrate the superiority of H.264/AVC with no motion estimation against MPEG-2 for sequences with moderate motion.