Introduction
At the January 2011 meetings of ISO/IEC MPEG, ITU-T VCEG, and the JCT-VC in Daegu, Republic of Korea, it was decided to establish a new test set of example video sequences for use in the development of the draft High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard. This test set is referred to informally as "Class F", which will be used in addition to the existing Class A, B, C, D and E test set classes used for experiments in this project. Class F will consist of screen content (non-camera-captured and mixed camera and non-camera imagery) uncompressed source video test sequences. In the near term, it will be used primarily for the study and improvement of the effectiveness of the draft HEVC standard for the coding of such content. It is also highly desirable for the content to be available for other subsequent uses in the other and subsequent work of ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T VCEG.
Some examples of such screen content include video sequences containing:
- Camera-view video content with text overlays, running banners, crawling/scrolling text, etc.
- Alpha blending
- Rendered animation content
- Presentations with various transition effects
- Document editing with scrolling, window switching, effects, various font sizes and colors, equations, graphics, etc.
- Document reading
- Web page browsing
- Gaming graphics
- Other rendered computer graphics
- Mobile device display content
While the HEVC design has been (and will continue to be) primarily evaluated based on camera-view scene content, as reflected in the current HEVC Class A, B, C, D and E common test conditions content, it is anticipated that the behavior of the design for Class F content should be studied to determine whether the behavior of the design is adequate on such other content.
Timeline
- To the extent feasible, materials are requested to be provided by March 8, 2011 in order to enable review of the material at the March 2011 JCT-VC meeting. Materials provided after this date are also welcome.
Submission procedure
- Test material must be accompanied by:
a copyright statement with information about terms of usage such as permission and date (See Note 1)
a description of the content in as much detail as possible
- An FTP site will be set up for uploading. The site location and login credentials will be provided to potential test material submitters that contact the coordinators.
Note 1: The conditions for usage of the video sequences should preferably involve as few restrictions as possible, and in particular must enable the use of the video sequences for the standardization development work of ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T VCEG for the development of the HEVC standard. It is also highly desirable for the content to be able to be used for general research, development, and demonstration of video signal processing technology and for snapshots to be allowed to be included in technical publications. If needed, the contact persons are able to provide an example of a copyright agreement that has been used in similar cases in the past.
Test material sought
The following attributes are the main focus for the test materials.
Color space can be YUV420, YUV444, or RGB.
Resolution have resolutions of 2560x1600, 1920x1080, 1280x720, 832x480, 416x240
Bit depth can be 8 or 10 bits per sample.
The video sequence duration should be at least 10 sec at 24, 30, 50, or 60 frames per second.
The content should be progressively scanned.
The sequences should not contain any artifacts from prior lossy encoding.
The test materials should cover a large variety of characteristics and content type that will be challenging for a typical video codec. The following are some possible examples:
Sophisticated graphical user interface depictions
Rapid window switching
Highly repeatable font usage with well-defined curvatures
Fast and complicated graphics and rendering in games and web pages
Slow and regular illumination changes
Transition effects including cross-fade, wipe, etc.
Logistics
Prospective contributors of test sequences should contact the following persons:
Gary Sullivan
Microsoft Corp.
1 Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052 USA
Jens-Rainer Ohm
RWTH Aachen University, Institute of Communications Engineering
Melatener Str. 23, D-52074, Aachen, Germany
Oscar C. Au
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Clearwater Bay, Hong Kong.
