Quadtree structures and improved techniques for motion representation and entropy coding in HEVC

Recently, the first milestone in the development of the High Efficiency Video Coding standard (HEVC) was reached by issuing the Committee Draft of the standard. In order to satisfy the growing need for higher coding efficiency than H.264/AVC as state-of-the-art video codec, the HEVC project was initiated by the ITU-T VCEG and the ISO/IEC MPEG jointly issuing a call for proposals on video compression technology. The key techniques of the Fraunhofer HHI response to the call such as a quadtree-based block structure for prediction and transform coding as well as improved prediction and transform coding methods have been incorporated into the HEVC design. In this paper, these techniques are revisited, their current implementation in HEVC is described and results showing the impact thereof are presented.