A survey on the H.264/AVC standard

H.264/AVC is a recently completed video compression standard jointly developed by ITU-T VCEG and ISO/IEC MPEG standards committees. The standard is becoming more popular as it promises much higher compression than that possible with earlier standards. The standard provides flexibilities in coding and organization of data which enable efficient error resilience. The increased coding efficiency offers new application areas and business opportunities. As might be expected, the increases in compression efficiency and flexibility come at the expense of increase in complexity, which is a fact that must be overcome. This paper provides an overview of the technical features of H.264 and summarizes the emerging studies related to new coding features of the standard.