New MPEG-4-AVC/H.264 Profiles for Professional and High-Quality Video Applications

To respond to strong demands for compression technology appropriate to high-quality video applications, the Joint Video Team (JVT) of MPEG and ITU-T has recently completed the standardization of five additional profiles for the MPEG-4 Part 10/H.264 video coding standard (ISO/IEC 14496–10ITU-T H.264) (also known as MPEG-4-AVC (for Advanced Video Coding). These new profiles have been developed to serve applications in the professional and semi-professional domains with enhanced compression capabilities for color sampling structure ranging up to 4:4:4 and bit depth dynamic ranges up to 14 bits per sample. Four of the five new profiles support “intra-only” applications with demands for extreme low-latency operation, simple editing, and frame random-access functionality. Potential applications of these new profiles include studio/cinematography camera and camcorders, digital video recording and editing systems, studio production and post-production systems, content contribution systems, and high-resolution display systems. This paper discusses the design, coding structure and tools, operation modes, profile definitions, and target application environments of these new profiles. Their improved coding performance will also be demonstrated by the rate distortion curves comparing these new profiles with some of the existing state-of-the-art compression solutions.