Comparison between HEVC and Thor based on objective and subjective assessments

The increasing popularity of HD TV, the emergence of beyond-HD formats and higher quality and resolution mobile TV services is posing a severe challenge on today’s broadcast networks. Next generation networks (e.g, DVB-T2, DVB-S2, etc.) and higher coding efficiency can provide a solution to this problem. High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the latest standard jointly released by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group and ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), but other options, royalty free, such as Thor, have recently emerged and are gaining popularity. In this paper a rate-distortion analysis of HEVC and Thor, is presented. The comparison is performed using both objective and subjective results and the results indicate an overall better performance of HEVC.