Abstract :
Royalty-free standards for image and video coding have been actively discussed for over 20 years. This paper breaks down the issues of designing royalty-free codecs into the major topics of requirements, video coding tools, classes of patents and performance. By dissecting the codec using a hierarchy of major to minor coding tools, it is possible to pinpoint where a patent impacts the video coding, and what the consequence will be of avoiding the patented tool.
