Compression performance and video quality comparison of HEVC and AVC

Abstract

The main purpose of the paper is to perform a quantitative and qualitative performance evaluation of the emerging standard H.265/HEVC in comparison to its predecessor H.264/AVC. The paper focuses on both the encoding and compression efficiency by measuring the PSNR values, SSIM scores and bit rate values of reference and non-reference signals. For the needs of the paper, the HEVC and AVC reference encoders have been used. Based on the experimental results, it is deduced that the HEVC meets its primary objective, which is to double the compression efficiency of the bit stream without significant degradation of the encoded video quality. Finally, interesting findings are also reported for the very low bit rate area of the encoding rate for low spatial resolutions.