Performance Comparison of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) with H.264 AVC

To fulfil the increasing demand for high resolution video, several compression standards have been developed in last two decades. Besides the requirement of real-time processing, the goal of video coding is to ensure good video quality within the provision of transmission and storage. This paper provides thorough study of video coding standards and video quality evaluation techniques. It also includes implementation and in-depth comparison of video coding standards like High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) and H.264/MPEG-4 part 10 AVC. The analysis of video coding standards has been carried out by using objective video quality metrics like PSNR, SSIM, MS-SSIM and VQM for three QCIF and three CIF resolution video sequences. Based on the obtained values of these performance metrics and compression factor, it is concluded that High Efficiency Video Coding standard is best suited for low bit rate and low-delay communication applications. The compression performance improved in HEVC relative to existing H.264 AVC standard is around 42% in terms of bit-rate reduction for nearly equivalent objective video quality.