nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Bit-Depth Scalable Video Coding

Scalable video coding (SVC) is an extension of H.264/AVC, which is currently being developed by the Joint Video Team. SVC supports any combination of temporal, spatial, and SNR scalability, but there is no special treatment for the case that two or more different bit-depths have to be supported by the scalable bit-stream. There is a number of applications (especially in the HD area) which would benefit from a design where an H.264/AVC conforming base layer with a sample bit-depth of typically 8 bit is extended in a backwards compatible way by an higher bit-depth enhancement layer. In this paper we present new techniques which can be used to achieve bit-depth scalability and show experimental results.
3D High-Efficiency Video Coding for Multi-View Video and Depth Data

This paper describes an extension of the high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard for coding of multi-view video and depth data. In addition to the known concept of disparity-compensated prediction, inter-view motion parameter, and inter-view residual prediction for coding of the dependent video views are developed and integrated. Furthermore, for depth coding, new intra coding modes, a modified motion compensation and motion vector coding as well as the concept of motion parameter inheritance are part of the HEVC extension. A novel encoder control uses view synthesis optimization, which guarantees that high quality intermediate views can be generated based on the decoded data. The bitstream format supports the extraction of partial bitstreams, so that conventional 2D video, stereo video, and the full multi-view video plus depth format can be decoded from a single bitstream. Objective and subjective results are presented, demonstrating that the proposed approach provides 50% bit rate savings in comparison with HEVC simulcast and 20% in comparison with a straightforward multi-view extension of HEVC without the newly developed coding tools.
A complexity scalable entropy coding scheme for video compression

In hybrid video coding, an entropy coding scheme transmits the quantized transform coefficients, resulting from block-based transformation and quantization of the difference between the prediction signal and the original signal, and additional side information. The state-of-the-art hybrid video coding standard H.264/AVC defines two different entropy coding schemes with different complexity-performance tradeoff. As a result, the support for two different entropy coding schemes has to be maintained and introduces several problems. To overcome these issues, a unified solution is proposed, which is based on the PIPE/V2V coding concept. It achieves the same complexity-performance trade-offs as the existing entropy coding schemes by scalability. The advantage of the proposed scheme over the existing concept is the usage of the same set of tools for all configurations. Simulation results and complexity analysis on hardware show the efficiency of the proposed scheme.
Probability interval partitioning entropy coding using systematic variable-to-variable length codes

The recently emerging probability interval partitioning entropy (PIPE) coding scheme offers high coding efficiency at a comparably low complexity level. In this paper, a new set of systematic variable-to-variable length (v2v) codes is proposed for use within the PIPE coding concept that allows the complexity requirements to be reduced even further. The proposed systematic v2v codes can be efficiently implemented by using simple counters instead of memory consuming tables. At the same time, the average number of operations per decoded binary symbol can be reduced by more than a factor of 2 relative to a fast multiplication-free binary arithmetic decoder. In terms of coding efficiency, experimental results show that in a typical video coding environment the average Bj⊘ntegaard delta (BD) rate increase is typically less than 0.5% when compared to the use of nearly optimal binary arithmetic codes.
Macroblock-Adaptive Residual Color Space Transforms for 4:4:4 Video Coding

Block-based video-coding for 4:4:4 color sampling is extended by an adaptive color space transform. The presented technique enables an encoder to switch between several given color space representations in order to optimize rate-distortion performance. Simulations based on the current draft of the H.264/MPEG4-AVC 4:4:4 extensions demonstrate that our technique provides a rate-distortion performance equal or better than that obtained when using any of the individual color spaces only.
Objective Performance Evaluation of the HEVC Main Still Picture Profile

The first version of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard was approved by both ITU-T and ISO/IEC in 2013 and includes three profiles: Main and Main 10 for typical video data with 8 and 10 bits, respectively, as well as a profile referred to as Main Still Picture (MSP) profile. Apparently, the MSP profile extends the HEVC application space toward still images which, in turn, brings up the question of how this HEVC profile performs relative to existing still image coding technologies. This paper aims at addressing this question from a coding-efficiency point-of-view by presenting a rate-distortion performance analysis of the HEVC MSP profile in comparison to other popular still image and video compression schemes, including JPEG, JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, VP8, VP9, and WebP. In summary, it can be stated that the HEVC MSP profile provides average bit-rate savings in the range from 10% to 44% relative to the whole set of competing video and still image compression schemes when averaged over a representative test set of photographic still images. Compared with Baseline JPEG alone, the average bit-rate saving for the HEVC MSP profile is 44%.
Quadtree structures and improved techniques for motion representation and entropy coding in HEVC

Recently, the first milestone in the development of the High Efficiency Video Coding standard (HEVC) was reached by issuing the Committee Draft of the standard. In order to satisfy the growing need for higher coding efficiency than H.264/AVC as state-of-the-art video codec, the HEVC project was initiated by the ITU-T VCEG and the ISO/IEC MPEG jointly issuing a call for proposals on video compression technology. The key techniques of the Fraunhofer HHI response to the call such as a quadtree-based block structure for prediction and transform coding as well as improved prediction and transform coding methods have been incorporated into the HEVC design. In this paper, these techniques are revisited, their current implementation in HEVC is described and results showing the impact thereof are presented.
The New High-Efficiency Video Coding Standard

Recent developments in camera and display technologies are supporting increasingly larger resolutions. At the same time, studies predict that the share of video data in overall consumer Internet traffic will become larger than 75%. These developments require a more efficient coding of digital video than the current video-coding standard H.264/ MPEG-4 AVC is capable of. The new High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard achieves this by introducing new coding tools as well as by improving techniques already known from H.264/MPEG- 4 AVC. Recent performance analyses comparing HEVC with H.264/MPEG-4 AVC High Profile show average bitrate reductions around 35 to 40% for a given objective quality while subjective test results indicate that a 50% bitrate reduction for a comparable visual quality can be achieved. Besides techniques for substantially improving coding efficiency, large efforts have been put on facilitating parallel encoding and decoding in HEVC. This article presents in detail all these different aspects of HEVC.
Adaptive Temporal Scalability of H.264-Compliant Video Conferencing in Heterogeneous Mobile Environments

In this paper, we present a multipoint video conferencing system that adapts to heterogeneous members including mobiles. The system is built upon a low complexity scalable extension of our H.264 codec DAVC, and a congestion-aware dynamic adaptation layer. Our temporally scaled video codec DSVC has the same RD performance as the non-scaled version with comparable configuration. We achieve this by QP cascading, i.e., assigning gradually refining quantization parameters to the declining temporal layers. We present and analyse a mobile-compliant version of DSVC at reduced complexity that still admits comparable performance. Finally, we report on early work of dynamic layer tuning. Derived of delay variation measures, senders exploit scalable video layering to adapt the video transmission to varying network conditions. Initial results indicate that video performance remains close to optimal.
Efficient representation and coding of prediction residuals and parameters in frame-based animated mesh compression

For compression of 3-D dynamic meshes, the novel framework of so-called frame-based animated mesh compression (FAMC) has been introduced recently. In this context, we propose an efficient scheme for representation and statistical coding which is conceptually based on our previous work on context-based adaptive binary arithmetic coding (CABAC). After reviewing the basic principles of both CABAC and FAMC, we present suitable modifications and adaptations of both concepts in order to build an integrated solution with a high degree of coding efficiency. To this end, particular focus of our study has been put on the design of appropriate binarization and context modeling schemes. In our experiments, we obtained average bit-rate savings of more than 30% for a typical test set of dynamic meshes, when comparing the final design of our CABAC enriched FAMC scheme to the original version of FAMC using a conventional N-ary arithmetic coder. Our integrated approach has been adopted recently as part of the MPEG-4 Animated Framework extension (AFX).
The H.264/MPEG4 advanced video coding standard and its applications

H.264/MPEG4-AVC is the latest video coding standard of the ITU-T video coding experts group (VCEG) and the ISO/IEC moving picture experts group (MPEG). H.264/MPEG4-AVC has recently become the most widely accepted video coding standard since the deployment of MPEG2 at the dawn of digital television, and it may soon overtake MPEG2 in common use. It covers all common video applications ranging from mobile services and videoconferencing to IPTV, HDTV, and HD video storage. This article discusses the technology behind the new H.264/MPEG4-AVC standard, focusing on the main distinct features of its core coding technology and its first set of extensions, known as the fidelity range extensions (FRExt). In addition, this article also discusses the current status of adoption and deployment of the new standard in various application areas
A temporally scalable video codec and its applications to a video conferencing system with dynamic network adaption for mobiles

In this paper we present a multipoint video conferencing system that adapts to heterogeneous members including mobiles. The system is built upon a low complexity scalable extension of our H.264 codec DAVC, and a congestion-aware dynamic adaptation layer. We show that our temporally scaled video codec DSVC has the same RD performance as the non-scaled version with comparable configuration. We achieve this by QP cascading, i.e., assigning gradually refining quantization parameters to the declining temporal layers. The different quantization of frames does not lead to visually distinguishable quality fluctuations. We also present and analyze a mobile-compliant version of DSVC at reduced complexity that still admits comparable performance. Finally, we report on early work of dynamic layer tuning. Derived of delay variation measures, senders exploit scalable video layering to adapt the video transmission to varying network conditions. Initial results indicate that video performance remains close to optimal.
Joint Optimization of Transform Coefficients for Hierarchical B Picture Coding in H.264/AVC

Coding of video sequences using hierarchical B pictures in the joint scalable video model (JSVM) for the scalability amendment of H.264/AVC has the benefit of improved rate distortion efficiency relative to other known temporal decomposition structures, besides providing temporal scalability. In the operational encoder control of the JSVM, the inter-picture dependencies within a hierarchical B picture structure are considered using a heuristic, where pictures that are more frequently used for motion compensation are coded with higher fidelity compared to pictures that are less often used for motion compensation. In this paper, we describe an approach where the dependencies introduced by motion compensation are also considered when selecting transform coefficient values. Our experimental results using an H.264/AVC conforming encoder show bit rate reductions of up to 10% compared to the quantization method used by JSVM.
Block merging for quadtree-based video coding

Quadtree-based block partitioning together with motion-compensated prediction has proven to be an efficient approach in video compression. However, when dealing with spatially neighboring blocks in uniformly displaced regions, quadtree-based partitioning may lead to redundant sets of transmitted motion parameters. This paper proposes and describes a simple but efficient block merging algorithm that aims at removing those redundancies by using only a single parameter set for a whole motion-compensated region of contiguous blocks. Simulation results show that our proposed merging technique works more efficiently than the conceptually similar direct mode as, e.g., specified in H.264/AVC. Due its efficiency and simplicity, our proposed merging approach has been adopted into the first test model of the high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standardization project, as currently pursued by ITU-T VCEG and ISO/IEC MPEG.
Overview of the Range Extensions for the HEVC Standard: Tools, Profiles, and Performance

The Range Extensions (RExt) of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard have recently been approved by both ITU-T and ISO/IEC. This set of extensions targets video coding applications in areas including content acquisition, postproduction, contribution, distribution, archiving, medical imaging, still imaging, and screen content. In addition to the functionality of HEVC Version 1, RExt provide support for monochrome, 4:2:2, and 4:4:4 chroma sampling formats as well as increased sample bit depths beyond 10 bits per sample. This extended functionality includes new coding tools with a view to provide additional coding efficiency, greater flexibility, and throughput at high bit depths/rates. Improved lossless, near-lossless, and very high bit-rate coding is also a part of the RExt scope. This paper presents the technical aspects of HEVC RExt, including a discussion of RExt profiles, tools, applications, and provides experimental results for a performance comparison with previous relevant coding technology. When compared with the High 4:4:4 Predictive Profile of H.264/Advanced Video Coding (AVC), the corresponding HEVC 4:4:4 RExt profile provides up to ~25$ %, ~32%, and ~36% average bit-rate reduction at the same PSNR quality level for intra, random access, and low delay configurations, respectively.
Performance comparison of H.265/MPEG-HEVC, VP9, and H.264/MPEG-AVC encoders

This work presents a performance comparison of the two latest video coding standards H.264/MPEG-AVC and H.265/MPEG-HEVC (High-Efficiency Video Coding) as well as the recently published proprietary video coding scheme VP9. According to the experimental results, which were obtained for a whole test set of video sequences by using similar encoding configurations for all three examined representative encoders, H.265/MPEG-HEVC provides significant average bit-rate savings of 43.3% and 39.3% relative to VP9 and H.264/MPEG-AVC, respectively. As a particular aspect of the conducted experiments, it turned out that the VP9 encoder produces an average bit-rate overhead of 8.4% at the same objective quality, when compared to an open H.264/MPEG-AVC encoder implementation - the x264 encoder. On the other hand, the typical encoding times of the VP9 encoder are more than 100 times higher than those measured for the x264 encoder. When compared to the full-fledged H.265/MPEG-HEVC reference software encoder implementation, the VP9 encoding times are lower by a factor of 7.35, on average.
SNR-scalable extension of H.264/AVC

We present an SNR-scalable extension of the H.264/AVC video coding standard. To achieve an efficient SNR-scalable bit-stream representation of a video sequence, the temporal dependencies between pictures are exploited by using an open-loop subband approach. The related temporal analysis-synthesis filter bank structure is generalized to facilitate an adaptive block-based choice between the motion-compensated lifting representations of the Haar filter (uni-directional prediction) and the 5/3 filter (bi-directional prediction), both coupled with multiple-reference frame capabilities. As a remarkable feature of our approach, most components of H.264/AVC are used as specified in the standard, while only a few have been adjusted to the motion-compensated temporal filtering structure. Our proposed SNR-scalable extension was tested for a set of CIF sequences, and the results indicate that a coding efficiency comparable to that of the state-of-the-art H.264/AVC standard can be achieved.
A unified and complexity scalable entropy coding scheme for video compression

The state-of-the-art hybrid video coding standard H.264/AVC defines two entropy-coding schemes with different complexity-performance trade-offs. Supporting these two schemes within a single standard raises several problems ranging from higher efforts for product development to increased silicon costs for hardware implementations. To overcome these issues, this work proposes a unified and complexity-scalable entropy-coding framework that is based on PIPE/V2V. The proposed framework uses a single set of tools for all configurations and achieves the same complexity-performance trade-offs as the existing entropy-coding schemes through scalability.
Coding efficiency comparison of AV1/VP9, H.265/MPEG-HEVC, and H.264/MPEG-AVC encoders

This work presents a coding efficiency evaluation of the recently published first release of the video coding scheme of the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), so called AOM/AV1, in comparison to the video coding standards H.264/MPEG-AVC (Advanced Video Coding) and H.265/MPEG-HEVC (High-Efficiency Video Coding). As representatives of the two last-mentioned video coding standards, the corresponding reference software encoders of JM and HM were selected, and for HEVC, in addition, the Fraunhofer HHI HEVC commercial software encoder and the open source software implementation x265 were used. According to the experimental results, which were obtained by using similar configurations for all examined representative encoders, the H.265/MPEG-HEVC reference software implementation provides significant average bit-rate savings of 38.4 % and 32.8 % compared to AOM/AV1 and H.264/MPEG-AVC, respectively. Particularly, when directly compared to H.264/MPEG-AVC High Profile, the AOM/AV1 encoder produces an average bit-rate overhead of 10.5% at the same objective quality. In addition, it was observed that the AOM/AV1 encoding times are quite similar to those of the full-fledged HM and JM reference software encoders. On the other hand, the typical encoding times of the HM encoder are in the range of 30–300 times higher on average than those measured for the configurable HHI HEVC encoder, depending on its chosen trade-off between encoding speed and coding efficiency.
Highly efficient video compression using quadtree structures and improved techniques for motion representation and entropy coding

This paper describes a novel video coding scheme that can be considered as a generalization of the block-based hybrid video coding approach of H.264/AVC. While the individual building blocks of our approach are kept simple similarly as in H.264/AVC, the flexibility of the block partitioning for prediction and transform coding has been substantially increased. This is achieved by the use of nested and pre-configurable quadtree structures, such that the block partitioning for temporal and spatial prediction as well as the space-frequency resolution of the corresponding prediction residual can be adapted to the given video signal in a highly flexible way. In addition, techniques for an improved motion representation as well as a novel entropy coding concept are included. The presented video codec was submitted to a Call for Proposals of ITU-T VCEG and ISO/IEC MPEG and was ranked among the five best performing proposals, both in terms of subjective and objective quality.
Entropy coding in video compression using probability interval partitioning

We present a novel approach to entropy coding, which provides the coding efficiency and simple probability modeling capability of arithmetic coding at the complexity level of Huffman coding. The key element of the proposed approach is a partitioning of the unit interval into a small set of probability intervals. An input sequence of discrete source symbols is mapped to a sequence of binary symbols and each of the binary symbols is assigned to one of the probability intervals. The binary symbols that are assigned to a particular probability interval are coded at a fixed probability using a simple code that maps a variable number of binary symbols to variable length codewords. The probability modeling is decoupled from the actual binary entropy coding. The coding efficiency of the probability interval partitioning entropy (PIPE) coding is comparable to that of arithmetic coding.
Performance analysis of HEVC-based intra coding for still image compression

Preliminary performance comparisons between the current test model encoder of the upcoming high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard and an H.264/AVC High Profile conforming encoder report average bit-rate savings of about 40% and 25% for a random-access and an all-intra configuration, respectively. Even though H.264/AVC and HEVC are primarily designed for video coding applications, it might be interesting to find out how their corresponding intra-coding tools perform when applied to still images, especially when compared to current state-of-the-art still image coding standards. To this end, we evaluated the intra-only coding modes of HEVC and H.264/AVC together with popular image-coding standards like JPEG, JPEG 2000, and JPEG XR as well as the proprietary WebP scheme. By using a representative test set of photographic still images, we obtained a clear ranking in terms of objective coding performance with average bit-rate savings in the range of 17-44% for HEVC intra-only coding relative to all other competing coding schemes.
Perceptually Optimised Video Compression

The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Initial Training Network on Perceptually Optimised Video Compression, called PROVISION, is a collaborative network between academic and industrial partners within the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission. Its key aim is to deliver technical advances well beyond the capabilities of current video compression standards, focusing on human visual perception for the future of video compression. This paper gives an overview of the PROVISION project, including the challenges that motivated its creation, the related scientific work supporting the project and its main objectives. Examples of some specific research topics addressed in the context of the project are also presented.