HEVC coding optimisation for Ultra High Definition television services

Ultra High Definition TV (UHDTV) services are being trialled while UHD streaming services have already seen commercial débuts. The amount of data associated with these new services is very high thus extremely efficient video compression tools are required for delivery to the end user. The recently published High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard promises a new level of compression efficiency, up to 50% better than its predecessor, Advanced Video Coding (AVC). The greater efficiency in HEVC is obtained at much greater computational cost compared to AVC. A practical encoder must optimise the choice of coding tools and devise strategies to reduce the complexity without affecting the compression efficiency. This paper describes the results of a study aimed at optimising HEVC encoding for UHDTV content. The study first reviews the available HEVC coding tools to identify the best configuration before developing three new algorithms to further reduce the computational cost. The proposed optimisations can provide an additional 11.5% encoder speed-up for an average 3.1% bitrate increase on top of the best encoder configuration.