Mitsubishi Electric Corporation and NHK, Japan's national public broadcasting organization, have developed the world's first HEVC (High-Efficiency Video Coding) encoder for 8K ultra HDTV “Super Hi-Vision†(SHV).
Dubbed as the broadcasting medium of the near future, SHV features 16 times the number of HD pixels and a 22.2 multichannel surround sound experience.
HEVC, which offers roughly double the data compression of AVC2 and about four times that of the MPEG-2 standard currently employed for digital HDTV broadcasting, is set to be adopted as an international standard this year.
The high-volume SHV images are divided into 17 horizontal rows. The parallel processing of these rows makes it possible to achieve real-time coding of SHV images. The deterioration of picture quality at the row boundaries has been lessened by having rows share data concerning the speed and direction of moving objects.
NHK and Mitsubishi Electric Corporation are pursuing research and development of real-time coding of the 120 Hz frame frequency of SHV.
HEVC is video coding technology that divides a frame into small blocks referred to as macroblocks and the prediction and transformation coding of the images is conducted in each one. HEVC offers variable blocks that can handle up to 64x64 pixels, changing the size according to texture, while AVC has relied on a fixed macroblock size of 16x16 pixels. It achieves both high compression and high resolution.
The new encoder divides the SHV into 17 rows made up of 7,680 x 256 pixels. The coding in each of the rows is processed simultaneously. Data in each row is shared with the row immediately above and below, thereby lessening the deterioration in picture quality that occurs at the row boundaries.