Motion Vector Coding in the HEVC Standard

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is an emerging international video coding standard developed by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC). Compared to H.264/AVC, HEVC has achieved substantial compression performance improvement. During the HEVC standardization, we proposed several motion vector coding techniques, which were crosschecked by other experts and then adopted into the standard. In this paper, an overview of the motion vector coding techniques in HEVC is firstly provided. Next, the proposed motion vector coding techniques including a priority-based derivation algorithm for spatial motion candidates, a priority-based derivation algorithm for temporal motion candidates, a surrounding-based candidate list, and a parallel derivation of the candidate list, are also presented. Based on HEVC test model 9 (HM9), experimental results show that the combination of the proposed techniques achieves on average 3.1% bit-rate saving under the common test conditions used for HEVC development.