HEVC in wireless environments

The increasing demand for real-time applications with high and ultra-high-definition video urged the ITU-T and the ISO/IEC to join their forces to develop the next-generation video coding standard. The new coding standard that has been produced is known as High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). The proposed HEVC standard fulfilled its target to achieve more than 50 % improvement in video compression over the existing H.264 Advanced Video Coding standard, keeping comparable image quality, at the expense of increased computational complexity. Advances in wireless communications and mobile networking have dramatically increased the popularity of video services for mobile users, with video delivery at their fingertips. Delivering high perceptual quality video over wireless environments is challenging due to the changing channel quality and the variations in the importance of one source packet to the next for the end user’s quality of experience. The main objective of this paper is to provide an overview over the new characteristics which are likely to be used in HEVC in wireless environments and discusses several research challenges. Experimental results demonstrate that for low-delay wireless video communications, the HEVC codec is more effective compare to previous H.264 codec and shows better overall performance. Both subjective and objective visual quality comparative study has been also carried out to validate the proposed approach.