History and Recent Developments of AVS Video Coding Standards

AVS(audio video coding standard) is the informal name of Work group for Digital Audiovideo Coding Standard of China, which was founded by the Science and Technology Department under former Ministry of Information Industry in June 2002, approved by Standardization Administration of China. The role of the group is to establish general technical standards for the compression, decoding, processing, and the representation of digital audio-video, thereby enabling digital audio-video equipment and systems with high-efficiency and economical coding/decoding technologies. After more than ten years, AVS has established a series of video coding standards, including AVS1, AVS+ and AVS2. AVS1 and AVS2 are named from the first and second stage work of AVS, or the first and second generation standard, and AVS+ was established specially for China high definition TV broadcasting specially. AVS1 and AVS+ have been finished and widely used in various applications so far, and AVS2 is still under developing and will be released soon. This paper provides an overview of the history and recent developments of AVS video coding standards, including the key tools used in AVS and the comparison with the state-of-the-art technology, e.g. HEVC/H265. Moreover, a brief discussion and conclusion on the future video coding are provided.