NHK and Mitsubishi Electric announce world’s first HEVC encoder for 8K Super Hi-Vision

HEVC is due to be recognized as an international standard this year. It offers about double the data compression of AVC, and about four times that of the MPEG-2 standard currently employed for digital HDTV broadcasting.



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, direction, etc. of moving objects. (See Fig. 1 below).



NHK and Mitsubishi Electric Corporation are pursuing research and development of real-time coding of the 120 Hz frame frequency of SHV.



Features of HEVC: Video coding technology divides a frame into small blocks referred to as macroblocks. The prediction and transformation coding of the images is conducted in each block. 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.





Fig. 1 Schematic diagram of parallel processing in prototype HEVC encoder



Features of the HEVC encoder: The SHV screen is divided in 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.



Specifications of HEVC encoder for SHV: