H.265 Video Encoding Analysis

The proliferation of airborne imaging sensor platforms, especially unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), critical for Information Dominance, means that ISR imagery volumes are growing exponentially, while tactical data link bandwidths become ever scarcer. This puts a premium on optimizing the utility of the available TCDL capacity. Since full motion video (FMV) is currently the single largest image data generator, on-board compression of FMV is a critical enabling technology. But an important further complication is that the tactical data link, being wireless, is not error free. Instead, it can suffer packet losses as bit errors, which can significantly degrade the value of transmitted video data. H.264 seems to be more resilient than H.265, due to its lower complexity design. In phase 2, we test: with a powerful half-rate forward error correction (FEC) scheme used in the Tactical Common Data Link (TCDL), can H.265 finally surpass H.264?