HEVC Mezzanine Compression for UHD Transport over SDI and IP Infrastructures

The industry expects that the ultrahigh-definition (UHD-1) format will become the mainstream in the next few years, improving consumers’ viewing experience by introducing higher resolution, wider color gamut, higher dynamic range, and higher frame rate, among other things. These remarkable improvements demand bandwidths beyond the ones provided by 3G-serial digital interface (SDI) interfaces and 10 GbE IT infrastructures. In order to ease UHD-1 format adoption in current production facilities, several lightweight compression schemes have been proposed in the industry. The new Range Extensions recently approved as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Version 2 introduce advanced coding tools giving support for 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 schemes, bit depth up to 16 bits, and high throughput. This paper analyzes how the HEVC intracoding architecture can be adapted to meet the quality, latency, and complexity requirements demanded by UHD-1 mezzanine compression. Three experimental laboratory tests were conducted for lossless, near-lossless (4:1), and cascaded encoding modes, and the results of the HEVC quality performance and robustness were compared with the popular JPEG 2000 and SMPTE VC-2 video coding standards, among others.