HEVC Mezzanine Compression for UHD Transport over SDI and IP infrastructures

摘要

The industry expects that the Ultra-HD (UHD-1) format will become the mainstream in the next few years, improving the consumers' viewing experience by introducing a higher resolution, a wider color gamut (WCG), a higher dynamic range (HDR) and a higher frame rate (HFR), among others. These remarkable improvements demand bandwidths beyond the ones provided by 3G-SDI interfaces and 10GbE IT infrastructures. In order to ease the UHD-1 format adoption over current production facilities, several lightweight compression schemes have been proposed by the industry. — The new Range Extensions (RExt) recently approved as the HEVC Version 2, introduce advanced coding tools giving support for 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 schemes, bit-depth up to 16-bits, and high throughput. This paper analyzes how the HEVC Intra-coding architecture can be adapted to meet the quality, latency and complexity requirements demanded by the UHD-1 mezzanine compression. — Three experimental lab tests were conducted for lossless, near-lossless (4:1) and cascaded encoding modes, and the results of the HEVC quality performance and robustness were compared to the popular JPEG2000 and SMPTE VC-2 video coding standards, among others.