Study of decoder complexity for HEVC and AVC standards based on tool-by-tool comparison

Abstract

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the latest standardization efforts of ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T VCEG for further improving the coding efficiency of H.264/AVC standard. It has been reported that HEVC can provide comparable subjective visual quality with H.264/AVC at only half bit-rates in many cases. In this paper, decoder complexities between HEVC and H.264/AVC are studied for providing initial complexity estimates of the HEVC decoder compared with the H.264/AVC decoder. For this purpose, several selected coding tools including intra prediction, motion compensation, transform, loop filters and entropy coder have been analyzed in terms of number of operations as well as their statistical differences. © 2012 SPIE.