An Introduction to High Efficiency Video Coding Range Extensions.docVIP

An Introduction to High Efficiency Video Coding Range Extensions 　　Abstract High Efficiency Video Coding （HEVC） is the latest international video coding standard， which can provide the similar quality with about half bandwidth compared with its predecessor， H.264/MPEG?4 AVC. To meet the requirement of higher bit depth coding and more chroma sampling formats， range extensions of HEVC were developed. This paper introduces the coding tools in HEVC range extensions and provides experimental results to compare HEVC range extensions with previous video coding standards. Experimental results show that HEVC range extensions improve coding efficiency much over H.264/MPEG?4 AVC High Predictive profile， especially for 4K sequences. 　　Keywords H.265； High Efficiency Video Coding （HEVC）； MPEG?H； range extensions； video compression 　　1 Introduction 　　High Efficiency Video Coding （HEVC） [1] is the latest international video coding standard， standardized as ITU?T Recommendation H.265 and ISO/IEC 23008? （MPEG?H Part 2）. Compared with its predecessor， H.264/MPEG?4 Advanced Video Coding （AVC） [2]， about 50% bit saving can be achieved [3]. Although HEVC version 1 supports a wide variety of applications， some key features are not included and left for further developments. 　　After the finalization of HEVC version 1， several extensions of HEVC are being developed. Of these， Range Extensions （RExt） support various chroma sampling formats and higher bit depth. Screen Content Coding Extensions （SCC） are based on RExt， mainly focusing on improving the coding efficiency for screen content [4]. The development of SCC started in Apr. 2014 and is expected to be finalized in early 2016. Both RExt and SCC are single?layer extensions of HEVC. There are also several extensions of HEVC targeting multiple layers. Scalable HEVC extension （SHVC） focuses on serving a same content with different bandwidth （e.g.， different spatial resolution， as known as spatial scalability and different quality， as kn