Summary of results of the first JCT-VC meeting in Dresden

--text adopted from Gary Sullivan

JCT-VC stands for Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding and is basically the successors of the Joint Video Team (JVT) which was responsible for standardizing the award-winning Advanced Video Coding (AVC) standard. Last week, the JCT-VC met the first time in Dresden for the evaluation of the joint call for proposals on video compression technology and Gary Sullivan provided a nice summary over the general JCT-VC reflector which is excerpted here.

The name for the new standardization project is now "High Efficiency Video Coding" (HEVC).

The Joint Call for Proposals (CfP) on Video Compression Technology, which was issued by ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T VCEG in January 2010, had a very successful outcome. Twenty-seven complete proposal submissions were received, and the associated video material was evaluated in extensive subjective tests that were conducted prior to the first meeting of the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC). That meeting was held under MPEG auspices in Dresden during 15-23 April 2010. The contribution documents for those proposals are at the above link with contribution numbers JCTVC-A101 to JCTVC-A127.

The test results clearly indicated that some proposals exhibited a substantial improvement in compression performance as compared to the corresponding AVC anchors - and, in a number of cases, the performance of the best proposals can be roughly characterized as achieving similar quality when using only half of the bit rate.

All proposals basically used a coding architecture that was conceptually similar to AVC (and prior video coding standards), containing the following basic elements:

• Block-based
• Variable block sizes
• Block motion compensation
• Fractional-pel motion vectors
• Spatial intra prediction
• Spatial transform of residual difference
• Integer-based transform designs
• Arithmetic or VLC-based entropy coding
• In-loop filtering to form final decoded picture

However, there was a large variety of differences at the individual coding tool level.

For further details, please subscribe to the JCT-VC reflector and look for the corresponding email in the archives.