Comparative study between two video compression standards : the H.264 and the high efficiency video coding

Abstract EN

Video compression techniques are used to reduce the number of bits required to represent video data.

These techniques are standardized to allow inter-operability between different devices.

Many video compression standards have been developed over the last few decades.

This article presents an overview of the two latest video compression standards, the H.264 and the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC).

The major features and strengths and weaknesses of the two standards are particularly discussed.

It is found that while H.264 provides faster encoding than HEVC, HEVC provides much better compression performance compared to H.264.

The performance gains of HEVC are more prominent in case of lossy compression.

Moreover, it is found that despite better compression performance, due to its complicated royalty structure, HEVC lags significantly behind H.264 in terms of deployment.

Lastly, it is concluded that, in future, research in video compression techniques will focus on developing low-complexity encoding solutions and on leveraging artificial intelligence techniques for fast and efficient video compression.