A Review of Emerging Video Codecs: Challenges and Opportunities

This paper presents a review of video codecs that are in use and currently being developed, the codec development process, current trends, challenges and opportunities for the research community. There is a paradigm shift in video coding standards. Concurrently, multiple video standards are standardised by standardising organisations. At the same time, royalty free video compression standards are being developed and standardised. Introduction of enhancement-layer-based coding standards will extend the lifetime of legacy video codecs finding middle ground in improved coding efficiency, computational complexity and power requirements. The video coding landscape is changing that is challenged by emergence of multiple video coding standards for different use cases. These may offer some opportunities for coding industry, especially for New Zealand researchers serving niche markets in video games, computer generated videos and animations.