Enabling Ultra High Definition Television services with the HEVC standard: The thira project

Ultra High Definition TV (UHDTV) services are being trialled while UHD streaming services have already seen their commercial débuts. Given the very high amount of data associated with the UHDTV format, efficient compression technology such as the one specified by the state-of-the-art High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard should be employed. However, HEVC improved compression comes at the expense of increased complexity and, to distribute UHDTV streams under resource constraints and real time requirements, novel and efficient encoding architectures should be devised. THIRA is a collaborative project funded by InnovateUK which aims to research and develop viable video compression technology to deliver UHDTV content using HEVC. This paper presents an overview of the project, describing its main objectives and selected results.