Compression of high dynamic range video using the HEVC and H.264/AVC standards

The existing video coding standards such as H.264/AVC and High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) have been designed based on the statistical properties of Low Dynamic Range (LDR) videos and are not accustomed to the characteristics of High Dynamic Range (HDR) content. In this study, we investigate the performance of the latest LDR video compression standard, HEVC, as well as the recent widely commercially used video compression standard, H.264/AVC, on HDR content. Subjective evaluations of results on an HDR display show that viewers clearly prefer the videos coded via an HEVC-based encoder to the ones encoded using an H.264/AVC encoder. In particular, HEVC outperforms H.264/AVC by an average of 10.18% in terms of mean opinion score and 25.08% in terms of bit rate savings.