Performance Analysis And Comparison Of Dirac Video Codec With H.264 / Mpeg-4 Part 10 Avc

Abstract

Dirac is a hybrid motion-compensated state-of-the-art video codec that uses modern techniques such as wavelet transforms and arithmetic coding. It is an open technology, designed to avoid patent infringement and can be used without the payment of license fees. It is well suited to the business model of public service broadcasters as it can be easily recreated for new platforms. Dirac is aimed at applications ranging from HDTV (high definition television) to web streaming.H.264, MPEG-4 part-10 or AVC, is the latest digital video codec standard which has proven to be superior than earlier standards in terms of compression ratio, quality, bit rates and error resilience. However unlike Dirac, it requires payment of license / patent fees.The objective of this thesis is to implement Dirac video codec (encoder and decoder) based on several input test sequences, and compare its performance with H.264 / MPEG-4 Part 10 AVC. Analysis has been done on Dirac and H.264 using QCIF, CIF and SDTV video test sequences as input and the results have been recorded graphically for various parameters including compression ratio, bit rate, PSNR, SSIM and MSE. In these tests, encoding and decoding has been performed for quality factor ranging from 0 - 10 and for lossless compression. Apart from this, comparison between Dirac and H.264's performance has been implemented at various constant `target' bit rates ranging from 10KBps to 200KBps.