Signal Processing - September 2016 - 164

standards in a nutshell
Ronggang Wang, Tiejun Huang, Sang-hyo Park, Jae-Gon Kim,
Euee S. Jang, Cliff Reader, and Wen Gao

The MPEg Internet Video-coding Standard

o address the diversified needs of the
Internet, the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/
WG11 Moving Picture Experts
Group (MPEG) started the project of
Internet video coding (IVC) in July 2011.
It is anticipated that any patent declaration associated with the baseline profile
of this standard will indicate that the patent owner is prepared to grant a free-ofcharge license to an unrestricted number
of applicants worldwide. IVC has been
developed in MPEG from scratch by
combining well-known existing technology elements and new contributions with
free-of-charge licenses. Recently, IVC's
compression performance has been
determined to be approximately equal to
that of the advanced video coding high
profile (AVC HP) for typical operational
settings, both for streaming and lowdelay applications. In June 2015, the
IVC project was approved as ISO/IEC
14496-33 (MPEG-4 IVC). It is believed
that this standard can be highly beneficial for video services in the Internet
domain. This article describes the main
coding tools adopted in IVC; evaluates
its performance compared with web
video coding (WVC), video coding for
browsers (VCB), and AVC HP; and provides the subjective comparison results
between IVC and AVC HP.

Background
Video-coding standards lie at the heart
of every aspect of video in our lives,
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2016.2571440
Date of publication: 2 September 2016

164

including broadcast television, streaming video on the Internet, digital cinema,
movies on optical disks, home movies, and video conferencing. The most
famous image-coding standards, JPEG
and JPEG 2000, are royalty free (Type-1).
To address the diversified needs of the
Internet, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11
MPEG issued the call for proposals
(CfP) for the type-1 standard of IVC [1]
in July 2011.
Three codecs respond to the CfP,
including WVC [2], VCB [3] and IVC
[4]. WVC is proposed jointly by Apple,
Cisco, Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, Magnum Semiconductor, Polycom,
and Research in Motion Ltd. The coding tools in constrained AVC baseline
plus hierarchical P frames are adopted
in WVC. VCB is proposed by Google,
and the coding tools are the same as
those in VP8. IVC is proposed by several universities (including Peking University, Tsinghua University, Zhejiang
University, Hanyang University, Korea
Aerospace University, and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China), and its coding tools are
developed from scratch. These three
codecs try to meet the intellectual property rights policy requirement of IVC
with different strategies [5]. WVC and
VCB expect the patent holders would
like to grant a free-of-charge license for
the internet application scenarios. IVC
aims to create a new platform by utilizing coding tools for which patents have
expired and new contributions with freeof-charge licenses.
IEEE SIgnal ProcESSIng MagazInE

September 2016

In June 2015, the compression performance of IVC was determined to
be approximately equal to that of AVC
HP for typical operational settings, both
for streaming and low-delay applications [6], and the IVC project was formally approved as ISO/IEC 14496-33
(MPEG-4 IVC).

Coding tools in IVC
Similar to previous standards, IVC is
based on the traditional hybrid tra nsform and motion compensation framework, as shown in Figure 1. Only
progressive scan sequences are supported by IVC, and the input format of an
IVC encoder is YUV420. The basic coding unit is macroblock. A macroblock
consists of a 16 # 16 luminance block
and two corresponding 8 # 8 chroma
blocks. The input macroblock can either
be coded with intramode or intermode,
which is decided by the mode decision.
If intramode is selected, the blocks in
a macroblock are first predicted with
intraprediction, and then the residues
are processed with the modules of transform, quantization, and entropy coding,
sequentially. At last, the blocks are reconstructed and processed with deblocking to obtain the decoded blocks.
The decoded blocks are put into a forward frame buffer or backward frame
buffer for being referred to by motion
compensation. Otherwise, if intermode
is selected for the current macroblock,
motion compensation is invoked to get
the interpredictor, and the motion vectors used in the motion compensation
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