Subjective evaluation of HEVC intra coding for still image compression

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) demonstrates a significant improvement in compression efficiency compared to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, especially for video with resolution beyond HD, such as 4K UHDTV. One advantage of HEVC is the improved intra coding of video frames. Hence, it is natural to question how such intra coding compares to state of the art compression codecs for still images. This paper attempts to answer this question by providing a detailed analysis and performance comparison of HEVC intra coding with JPEG and JPEG 2000 (both 4:2:0 and 4:4:4 configurations) via a series of subjective and objective evaluations. The evaluation results demonstrate that HEVC intra coding outperforms standard codecs for still images with the average bit rate reduction ranging from 16% (compared to JPEG 2000 4:4:4) up to 43% (compared to JPEG). These findings imply that both still images and moving pictures can be efficiently compressed by the same coding algorithm with higher compression efficiency.