PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS AND COMPARISON OF THE 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 can be used without the payment of license fees. It can be easily adapted for new platforms and is aimed at applications ranging from HDTV to web streaming. The objective of this paper is to analyze Dirac video codec based on several input test sequences, and compare its performance with H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 AVC. Both Dirac and H.264 are implemented using different video test sequences at various constant "target" bit rates ranging from 10 KBps to 200 KBps at image resolutions from QCIF to SD. The results have been recorded graphically and we arrive at a conclusion whether Dirac's performance is comparable to H.264. We also research whether Dirac outperforms H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 in terms of computational speed and efficiency.