Survey on H.264 standard

Abstract

The progress of science and technology demands multimedia applications to be realized on embedded systems as it involves transfer of large amounts of data. Compared with standards such as MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Visual, H.264 can deliver better image quality at the same compressed bit rate or at a lower bit rate. The increase in compression efficiency and flexibility come at the expense of increase in complexity, which is a fact that must be overcome. Therefore, an efficient Co-design methodology is required, where the encoder software application is highly optimized and structured in a very modular and efficient manner, so as to allow its most complex and time consuming operations to be offloaded to dedicated hardware accelerators. This paper provides an overview of the features of H.264 and surveys the emerging studies related to new coding features of the standard. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.