MPEG-5 part 2 LCEVC (Low Complexity Enhancement Video Coding) is the new emerging video coding standard of the ISO/IEC MovingPicture Experts Group (MPEG).
While other video compression standards are based on including new techniques that usually lead to an increase in computational cost, LCEVC is not a stand-alone codec, but a complementary enhancement for all codecs.
LCEVC is a codec to improve other codecs with a low complexity overhead. It is a hybrid codec that incorporates two layers and two technologies into each encoded stream. The base layer is a low-resolution stream encoded from any existing codec, such as H.264, H.265, or VP9, which provides backward compatibility on platforms without an LCEVC decoder. The enhancement layer, which provides additional detail and resolution, is encoded using the LCEVC codec. The codec works by encoding the base layer and the difference between the reconstructed lower resolution image and the source using a different compression method (the enhancement layer). The remaining details are efficiently and rapidly compressed with specific tools designed to compress residual data. Therefore, LCEVC is a codec-agnostic enhancement data stream, improving compression and reducing processing complexity. It is important to note that in the process of improving visual quality, no additional latency is added.
In your application, you can execute the base layer in a mobile phone, laptop, or any device using the embedded hardware of this device. As you know Intel GPUs, SnapDragons chips, Nvidia GPUs have embedded hardware that is used to encode and decode the video using H.264 or H.265 standard. So you can use this hardware and the computational cost associated with the base layer could be close to zero for the processor. This embedded hardware typically includes some extra features to implement scalers which you can use to downsample the input image before encoding the base layer or to add other image processing algorithms.
The enhancement layer can be decoded in software if the device has enough computational power, otherwise, the enhancement layer could be discarded and decode only the base layer. This allows you to send the same stream to multiple devices without having separate parallel workflows for old and new devices, negatively impacting the business case to upgrade services.
