Recent Advances on HEVC Inter-frame Coding: From Optimization to Implementation and Beyond

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in HEVC inter-frame coding, focusing on optimization, hardware implementation, and new techniques to improve efficiency and reduce complexity for real-time applications.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive review of state-of-the-art HEVC inter-frame coding techniques, comparing algorithms across multiple aspects and guiding future research and development.

Findings

Various algorithms improve coding efficiency and reduce complexity.

Hardware implementations enable real-time HEVC encoding.

Advanced techniques enhance inter-frame coding performance.

Abstract

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) has doubled the video compression ratio with equivalent subjective quality as compared to its predecessor H.264/AVC. The significant coding efficiency improvement is attributed to many new techniques. Inter-frame coding is one of the most powerful yet complicated techniques therein and has posed high computational burden thus main obstacle in HEVC-based real-time applications. Recently, plenty of research has been done to optimize the inter-frame coding, either to reduce the complexity for real-time applications, or to further enhance the encoding efficiency. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art techniques for HEVC inter-frame coding from three aspects, namely fast inter coding solutions, implementation on different hardware platforms as well as advanced inter coding techniques. More specifically, different algorithms in each aspect are further subdivided into sub-categories and compared in terms of pros, cons, coding efficiency and coding complexity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such comprehensive review of the recent advances of the inter-frame coding for HEVC and hopefully it would help the improvement, implementation and applications of HEVC as well as the ongoing development of the next generation video coding standard.