A Comparative Performance Evaluation of the HEVC Standard with its Predecessor H.264/AVC for Medical videos over 4G and beyond Wireless Networks

Abstract

High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the latest video compression standard developed by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC). This standard is developed with an aim to reduce the video bitrate requirements by 50% with no degradation in the video quality. In the field of telemedicine, the HEVC standard can help in lowering the bitrate requirements for coding medical videos and thus enhance their compression efficiency and transmission performance over communication channels. In this paper, a comparative performance evaluation of the HEVC standard with its predecessor the H.264/AVC has been carried out in the context of medical videos. The evaluation results are achieved using three different configuration modes currently provided by the JCT-VC team, namely the random access, low delay and intra configurations. In order to perform a fair comparative evaluation, the H.264/AVC standard is also configured to match as close as possible to the configuration modes of the HEVC standard. The encoded videos of both HEVC and H.264 standards are transmitted over simulated 4G networks in order to study its influence on system resource utilisation and transmission efficiency. The test results show that the HEVC standard gives higher compression efficiency over the H.264/AVC standard, resulting in a reduction in bitrate requirements, which further helps in achieving better quality transmission over LTE/LTE-A networks.