Over the past few decades, significant resources have been invested in developing video codecs for the storage and delivery of video data. International standards development organizations, such as MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) and AOM (Alliance for Open Media), have fostered large-scale competitive collaboration among industry players. While open-source software developed alongside these video codec standards has accelerated verification of the standard and enabled rapid adoption, as it is used as a starting point for implementation and future research, this practice has not been fully applied to the ecosystem of mezzanine video codecs used in high-quality video capture and post-production. To address this gap, the industry's first open source project for collaborative innovation in professional video codecs, OpenAPV, has been established. The project aims to facilitate collaborative research and development of a royalty free, open source, and open standard video codec for professional use. This paper outlines the technical aspects of the video codec, together with the open source software implementation. The codec has been successfully tested across various platforms and shows excellent R-D (Rate-Distortion) performance and coding speed, even without hardware acceleration. Furthermore, it demonstrates robust quality resilience against multiple rounds of encoding and decoding cycles, which are common in video post-production. The open source project is hosted at https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/openapv.

In this paper, we propose a depth-wise flexible block processing method called split unit coding order (SUCO) for video coding. Conventionally, block-based image and video compression frameworks always apply raster scans to process blocks in order from left to right. Owing to the fixed coding order, the available information for prediction in the coding blocks is limited to adjacent blocks on the left and top. To address the limitations of block-based images and video compression frameworks, the proposed SUCO provides more flexibility in handling coding block sequences than predicted on the left and top, and thus coding blocks can take advantage of adjacent right information, such as reconstructed pixels and motion information. The flexibility is achieved by depth-wise signaling of preferred coding order for the given partitions. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed SUCO can effectively improve the coding efficiency of both intra and inter prediction in the latest video coding standards.

According a research report by Fortune Business Insights™, the global Electric Vehicles market is expected to grow from USD 287.36 billion in 2021 to USD 1,318.22 billion in 2028. This is mainly due to the growing consumer interest and rising concerns over environment.

This paper presents a flexible block processing order, called split unit coding order (SUCO), for video coding. In the conventional block-based image and video compression, the largest blocks are processed in a raster scan order while further partitioned blocks are processed in a z-scan order. Due to the fixed coding order, the information that can be exploited for prediction at coding block is limited to the left and above neighbors. Beyond the traditional prediction from left and above, the proposed SUCO allows more flexible processing order for the partitioned blocks so that the coding blocks could also utilize right neighboring information, such as reconstructed pixels and motion information, more adaptively. The impact of proposed coding order has been verified in the several video coding platforms: 2.1% and 2.1% BD-rate reduction on average in AI and RA configuration over HM12.1; 1.6% BD-rate reduction on average in RA over JEM3.1; 1.0% BD-rate reduction on average in RA over ETM4.1.

This paper proposes a new motion vector expression method named merge mode with motion vector difference (MMVD) for future video coding standards. In the previous standards, two approaches are typically used for motion vector representation. In the first one, the motion vector is derived from neighboring blocks and is directly used for motion compensation (merge mode in HEVC), and in the other one, the motion vector is represented with motion vector predictor and a difference (adaptive motion vector prediction; AMVP in HEVC). The merge mode benefits by saving bits for representing motion information. The AMVP represents more accurate motion information but it needs to signal the motion difference information, which consumes additional bits. MMVD provides a compromised solution for the tradeoff between motion vector accuracy and its overhead. MMVD can improve motion vector accuracy by introducing a simplified motion vector representation. The results show that the proposed method improves coding efficiency ofV VC with an average of 0.51% in BD-rate saving.

This paper describes a joint response to the Call for Proposals by Samsung, Huawei, GoPro, and HiSilicon on Video Compression with Capability beyond HEVC/H.265, jointly issued by ITU-T SG16 Q.6 (VCEG) and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11 (MPEG). In the proposed codec, the coding framework supports hierarchical splitting with binary and ternary trees and flexible coding order representations. Additionally, novel compression tools on inter/intra prediction, in-loop filtering, and entropy coding have been proposed. The proposed compression scheme provides significantly higher compression capability than the state-of-the-art HEVC/H.265 standard for SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) category while maintaining complexity acceptable for emerging applications. When all the proposed algorithmic tools are used, the proposed video codec achieves approximately 40% bit-saving for the SDR cetegory on average compared to HEVC/H.265 anchor.