HEVC Overview

H.265/HEVC is a widely deployed standardized video compression technology.  It has been developed by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) of the ITU-T Visual Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and the ISO/IEC Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG). The Joint Collaborative Team on 3D Video Coding Extension Development (JCT-3V) was established to work on multiview and 3D video coding extensions of HEVC.

The work on H.265/HEVC was split into the following overlapping phases.

• Phase 1: First version of H.265/HEVC:
  Specification of the Main, Main 10, and Main Still Picture profiles,
  April 2010 – April 2013.
• Phase 2: Format Range Extension (RExt):
  Specification of the Format Range Extension profiles,
  July 2012 – October 2014.
• Phase 3: Scalability Extension (SHVC):
  Specification of the Scalable Main and Scalable Main 10 profiles,
  October 2012 – October 2014.
• Phase 4: Multiview Extension (MV-HEVC):
  Specification of the Multiview Main profile,
  July 2012 – October 2014.
• Phase 5: 3D Extension (3D-HEVC):
  Specification of the 3D Main profile,
  July 2012 – February 2015.
• Phase 6: Screen Content Coding Extension (SCC):
  Ongoing, expected to be finalized in February 2016.

NOTE — More information on H.265/HEVC and the different extensions can be found on the HEVC support site.

The Video Coding Technologies Group contributed several essential coding tools and technologies to the H.265/HEVC standard, as listed below. Some of the contributions were developed in cooperation with the Multimedia Communication Group, the Video Coding Systems Group and the former 3D Coding Group.

In phase 1 (first version of H.265/HEVC) we contributed:

• Generic quadtree-based concept for block partitioning
• Residual quadtree for transform blocks
• Interpolation for motion compensated prediction
• Block merging for quadtree-based block partitioning
• Optimized transform coefficient level coding for CABAC
• Dependent slices for wavefront parallel processing

In phase 2 (RExt) we contributed:

• Cross-component prediction for in-loop color space conversion

In phase 3 (SHVC) we proposed:

• Scalable video coding extension of HEVC, using block-level coding tools and multi-loop decoding

In phase 4 (MV-HEVC) we contributed:

• Initial high-level syntax design

In phase 5 (3D-HEVC) we contributed:

• The first model for 3D-HEVC
• Geometry-based depth coding (wedgelet intra and contour inter-component prediction modes with residual adaptation)
• Synthesized view distortion for depth encoder control
• Concept of inter-view motion data prediction for dependent video views
• Concept of motion parameter inheritance for depth

The The Video Coding Systems and Video Coding Technologies Groups have been involved in the administration of the JCT-VC and JCT-3V standardization in various ways:

• Benjamin Bross has been appointed as Editor for the JCT-VC project (phase 1).
• Thomas Wiegand has been appointed as Co-Editor for the JCT-VC project (phase 1).
• Gerhard Tech has been appointed as Editor for the JCT-3V project (phases 4 and 5) and as Coordinator for the HTM reference software.
• Karsten Sühring has been appointed as Coordinator for the HM reference software.
• HHI has been chosen to host the HM Reference Software SVN repository.