New Generation Video Coding Standard: H.26L and its Performance Analysis

H 26L is a new generation video coding standard being established by ITU-T VCEG and ISO/IEC MPEG for video communication, which is aimed at very low bitrates, real time, low end-to-end delay coding for a variety of source materials. By adopting simple and straightforward approach using well-known building blocks, H 26L achieves coding efficiency higher than the other existing video coding standards greatly. On the basis of mature techniques such as transform on block, motion estimation/compensation, quantization and entropy coding, H 26L employs some new techniques, which ensure the coding efficiency. After introducing the H 26L coding standard, experiments are conducted on different block size and shape combinations, different motion estimation accuracy as well as two entropy coding methods. The experimental results proved that taking compression ratio, PSNR and complexities of encoder and decoder into account, the selection of block partition modes that are 8×8 and larger, 1/4-pixel resolution motion estimation and universal variable length coding can achieve the most economical compression results for the common video contents.