Overview of Baseline Profile in MPEG-5 Essential Video Coding Standard

The MPEG-5 Essential Video Coding (EVC) standard was finalized by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) in April 2020. The main objective of the EVC standard development was to provide a significantly improved compression efficiency over existing video coding standards with timely publication of licensing terms. To achieve the goal of the project, the EVC standard was developed with the royalty-free based Baseline profile (BP) as its base and a royalty bearing Main profile (MP) having a small number of improved coding tools on top of the Baseline profile. This paper presents EVC BP which can be a strong candidate for the streaming media application that is dominant in Internet platforms. To evaluate the coding performance of EVC BP, the testing result compared to H.264/AVC, which is the dominant codec in Internet services, is provided. In the testing result, the EVC BP shows 31.2% and 30.4% bit-rate reductions with only 40% and 23% encoding times under Random Access and Low Delay test conditions, respectively.