LAUSR

MPEG has produced standards that have provided the industry with the best video compression technologies. To address diverse Internet needs, MPEG issued a Call for Proposals (CfP) for Internet video coding (IVC) in July, 2011. The anticipation is that any patent declaration associated with the baseline profile of this standard will indicate that the patent owner is prepared to grant a free of charge license to an unrestricted number of applicants worldwide. Three codecs have responded to the CfP: Web video coding (WVC), video coding for browsers (VCB), and IVC. WVC is in fact the AVC baseline, and VCB uses the same coding tools as VP8. IVC has been developed in MPEG from scratch by combining well-known existing technology elements and new coding tools with royalty-free declarations. In June 2015, the IVC project was approved as ISO/IEC 14496–33 (MPEG-4 IVC). This standard can be highly beneficial for video services in the Internet domain. This paper describes the main coding tools used in IVC, and evaluates its objective and subjective performances compared with WVC, VCB, and AVC high profile (AVC HP). The experimental results show that IVC’s compression performance is approximately equal to that of the AVC HP for typical operational settings, both for streaming and low-delay applications, and is superior to WVC and VCB.