Performance Study of HEVC and H.264 Video Coding Standards

This paper summarizes efforts in describing the main concepts of the two recent video coding standards H.265/MPEG-HEVC (High-Efficiency Video Coding) and H.264/MPEG-AVC. The High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the successor video coding standard to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding) and was developed in 2013 by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) from the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG). An overview of the technical characteristics of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard is presented. It has been shown that the HEVC standard provides a significant improvement on the compression performance compared with the H.264 AVC. The FFMPEG codec is used as a research tool for studying the performance analysis and comparison of the HEVC and H.264 AVC compression standers. Evaluation metrics for comparison includes the PSNR (peak-peak Signal to Noise Ratio), VQM (Video Quality Model), MSAD, Delta and SSIM of HEVC and H.264 AVC for several video sequences and bit rates.