Objective Performance Evaluation of the HEVC Main Still Picture Profile

The first version of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard was approved by both ITU-T and ISO/IEC in 2013 and includes three profiles: Main and Main 10 for typical video data with 8 and 10 bits, respectively, as well as a profile referred to as Main Still Picture (MSP) profile. Apparently, the MSP profile extends the HEVC application space toward still images which, in turn, brings up the question of how this HEVC profile performs relative to existing still image coding technologies. This paper aims at addressing this question from a coding-efficiency point-of-view by presenting a rate-distortion performance analysis of the HEVC MSP profile in comparison to other popular still image and video compression schemes, including JPEG, JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, VP8, VP9, and WebP. In summary, it can be stated that the HEVC MSP profile provides average bit-rate savings in the range from 10% to 44% relative to the whole set of competing video and still image compression schemes when averaged over a representative test set of photographic still images. Compared with Baseline JPEG alone, the average bit-rate saving for the HEVC MSP profile is 44%.