During Apr. 15-23, 2010, the first meeting of JCT-VC was held in Dresden, DE. In the meeting, 27 responses to the Call for Proposal, issued in Jan. 2010, were reviewed and the associated video material was evaluated in extensive subjective tests.

Tentative Conclusions from CfP Responses Reviews

Coding tools used in respective proposals are listed in JCTVC-A203. High-level noteworthy aspects from the review of the proposals and the outcome of the subjective tests are outlined:

• Substantial progress in coding efficiency has clearly been demonstrated, compared with H.264/AVC
• There is no indication of a need to change the fundamental architecture of “conventional” hybrid video coding designs to achieve a substantial improvement
• Inclusion of support of larger block sizes in a highly variable (typically tree-structured) block segmentation approach is a major common theme, although large block sizes were not found in all proposals that did well subjectively (and objectively)
• Modif[......]

Read More…

Permanent Link: The First JCT-VC Meeting, Dresden, DE

[Update]: A new email reflector,  jct-vc@lists.rwth-aachen.de, is created for discussions of the new team effort. For subscription, you should follow this link: http://mailman.rwth-aachen.de/mailman/listinfo/jct-vc. Only subscribers to the list will be able to send messages to this list.

During the 39th VCEG and 91st MPEG meeting held in Kyoto, Japan on January 17-22, 2010, the call for proposals (CfP) on video compression technology (H.NGVC/HVC) will be finally issued jointly by ITU-T SG16 Q.6 (VCEG) and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11 (MPEG) on January 22, 2010. A Joint Collaborative Team (JCT) on Video Coding Standard Development will also be established accordingly between VCEG and MPEG.

Some minor modifications to draft CfP issued in November 2009 are made. The modifications involve the timeline, test conditions and test fees, etc., as follows:

• Timeline

The timeline of the Call for Proposals is changed:

2010/01/22:                 Final Call for Proposals.
2010/01/22:                 For[......]

Read More…

Permanent Link: Final Call for Proposals on H.NGVC/HVC Issued Jointly by VCEG and MPEG

In the beginning plenary of 90th MPEG meeting on Oct. 26, several national bodies, such as USNB, FRNB, SGNB, and CNNB, recommended to delay the submission date of responses to the Call for Proposal (CfP) on HVC from December 2009 to March 2010. The major concerns from the national bodies are:

• the need of sufficient time to finalize the establishment of collaborative team with VCEG and only then issue a joint CfP;
• the need of sufficient time to determine the cost of the subjective evaluation tests after the CfP is finalized;
• the need of sufficient time to refine the CfP test conditions/materials and only then generate the proposed bitstreams;
• the need of sufficient time to define the complexity evaluation criterion in an objective method for quantitative analysis,
• the need of sufficient time to perform the subjective evaluation tests but currently planned in the year-end holidays period.

This recommendation aroused controversy between the delegates of national bodies and the convenor,[......]

Read More…

Permanent Link: Delay the Submission of Responses to CfP on HVC, or not?

As well-known, JVT (a joint video team between MPEG and VCEG) has achieved great success in the standardization of the state-of-the-art video compression, including H.264/AVC, SVC, and MVC. The academic and industry want to continue the success in the collaboration between MPEG and VCEG. Some proposals from VCEG suggest the H.NGVC (or H.265) standardization should be collaboratively done with MPEG to produce a significantly advanced video coding standard and to avoid producing multiple similar standards, which confuse the market. VCEG agrees that conducting this work jointly with MPEG will be beneficial to avoid duplication of efforts in this area. Therefore, in this MPEG London meeting, a joint meeting between MPEG and VCEG discusses the future collaboration. However, the collaboration method arouses a lot of controversy, focusing on which one of the following practical experiences should be chosen:

• Practical experience 1: MPEG-2, a integrate part of video subgroup when under WG 11 a[......]

Read More…

Permanent Link: Future Collaboration between MPEG and VCEG

In the last MPEG meeting, MPEG issued a Call for Evidence (CfE) on High-performance Video Coding (HVC). Nine responses to the CfE are received in this meeting (89th MPEG London). Those reponse proposals adopt typical coding tools in KTA, such as adaptive loop filter (ALF), extended macroblock size (EMS), larger transform size (LTS), internal bit depth increasing (IBDI), adaptive quantization matrix selection (AQMS), as well as new tools, such as modified intra prediction, modified de-block filter, decoder-side motion vector derviation (DMVD).

The objective experimental results show that 20% average bit reduction is achieved compared with H.264/AVC High Profile for all classes of test video sequences (Class A: 19%, Class B:25%, Class C:22%, Class D: 15% bit reductions, respectively). Subjective evalution is also conducted during this meeting. The purpose of subjective evaluation is identifying examples that give the best evidence and assessing whether the evidence is large enough. The s[......]

Read More…

Permanent Link: Current Status of HVC (High-Performance Video Coding) in MPEG

In the 37th VCEG meeting,  held in Yokohama on April 15-18, a potential “NGVC” project standing for next-generation video coding was discussed, which could mean either an extension of H.264/AVC or a new standard, depending on which form of standardization is determined to be appropriate for the technology design.

The preliminary requirements of the NGVC project focus on the following areas.

1. Coding efficiency:

• NGVC should be capable of providing a bit rate reduction of 50% at the same subjective quality

2. Complexity:

• NGVC should be capable of operating with a complexity ranging from 50% to 3 times H.264/AVC High Profile.
• When operated at a complexity of 50% compared to H.264/AVC High Profile, NGVC should provide a 25% bit rate savings compared to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC High Profile at equivalent subjective quality.

3. Applications:

• Low-delay interactive video communications
• Surveillance
• Streaming
• Broadcast
• Digital cinema and large-screen digital imagery
• Mobile video enter[......]

Read More…

Permanent Link: The Preliminary Requirements for NGVC

H.265 is a long-term video coding standard, launched by VCEG. As indicated in ITU-T SG16′s homepage, VCEG plans to complete the requirement definition and begin the detailed algorithm design for H.265 in the study period 2005-2008, and if the progress in contribution technology is sufficient, H.265 is expected to be finalized in 2009-2010.

Currently, H.265 hasn’t been formalized and VCEG keeps seeking proposals and information regarding the possibility of a major gain in performance to justify the step from H.264 to H.265. Though the necessary scope of H.265 is yet to be determined, it is agreed that among the goals will be [AA01]:

• simplicity and “back to basics” approach
• high coding efficiency, e.g., two times compared with H.264
• computational efficiency, considering both encoder and decoder
• loss/error robustness
• network friendliness
• other considerations as necessary 

Backward/forward compatibility is not assumed to be required for H.265, as H.265 is a brand [......]

Read More…

Permanent Link: Current Status of H.265 (as at July 2008)