TABLE OF CONTENTS The H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard, in short H.264/AVC, is the latest video coding standard of the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). These two groups formed a joint video team (JVT) in 2000 to develop advanced video coding (AVC) under MPEG-4 Part 10 [11], and the final draft was approved in Spring 2003. H.264/AVC has enhanced visual quality at very low bitrates (low-delay end-to-end), particularly at rates below 24 kbps for mobile video applications. It has become the most widely accepted video coding standard since the deployment of MPEG-2. It covers all common video applications ranging from digital broadcasting, mobile services, and video conferencing to IPTV, HDTV, and HD video storage. Since the completion of the first version of the H.264/AVC standard, the JVT experts group has done further work to extend the capabilities of H.264/AVC with important new enhancements, known as the fidelity range extensions (FRExt) [47] [48], which further broaden the application domain of the new standard toward areas such as professional contribution, distribution, or studio post-production. Another set of extensions of H.264/AVC for scalable video coding (SVC) aims at creating a functionality that allows the reconstruction of video signals with various spatio-temporal resolutions from parts of the coded video representation (i.e., from partial bitstreams). Also, standardization of the multi-view video coding (MVC) extension is also under development.
The video coding of H.264/AVC is quite similar to that of MPEG-2 video coding, which consists of a hybrid of...
