Compression of High Dynamic Range Video Using the HEVC and H.264/AVC Standards

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the performance of HEVC and H.264/AVC standards on HDR video content, revealing HEVC's superior quality and efficiency in compression for HDR videos.

Contribution

The study provides a comparative analysis of HEVC and H.264/AVC on HDR content, highlighting HEVC's better subjective quality and significant bit rate savings.

Findings

HEVC outperforms H.264/AVC in HDR video compression.

HEVC achieves 10.18% higher mean opinion score.

HEVC saves 25.08% in bit rate compared to H.264/AVC.

Abstract

The existing video coding standards such as H.264/AVC and High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) have been designed based on the statistical properties of Low Dynamic Range (LDR) videos and are not accustomed to the characteristics of High Dynamic Range (HDR) content. In this study, we investigate the performance of the latest LDR video compression standard, HEVC, as well as the recent widely commercially used video compression standard, H.264/AVC, on HDR content. Subjective evaluations of results on an HDR display show that viewers clearly prefer the videos coded via an HEVC-based encoder to the ones encoded using an H.264/AVC encoder. In particular, HEVC outperforms H.264/AVC by an average of 10.18% in terms of mean opinion score and 25.08% in terms of bit rate savings.