Performance of the H.263 Video Compression Standard

The draft international standard ITU-T H.263 is closely related to the well known and widely used ITU-T Recommendation H.261. However, H.263 does provide the same subjective image quality at less than half the bit-rate. In this paper we investigate to what extend single enhancements of H.263 contribute to this performance gain, and consider the trade-off quality vs. complexity. Based on typical test sequences, H.263 with its various modes is compared to H.261 on the basis of rate distortion curves at bit-rates up to 128 kbps. At 64 kbps, the performance gain of H.263 in its default mode compared to H.261 is approximately 2 dB. This improvement is achieved with only little increase of complexity, and is mainly due to more accurate motion compensation with half-pel accuracy. Considering the trade-off quality vs. complexity, the combination of the optional coding-modes "Advanced prediction mode" and "PB-frames mode" is a good compromise, resulting in an additional performance gain of 1.5 dB PSNR at 64 kbps. The "Syntax-based arithmetic coding mode" on the other hand, offers only a very small performance gain (0.1 dB at 64 kbps) for its increased computational complexity. Results from profiling an H.263 software codec are presented in order to support complexity considerations of the optional coding-modes.