Fast field pairing in HEVC

Unlike previous video coding standards such as MPEG-2/H.262 and MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, the new video coding standard HEVC does not require a complementary field pair to be consecutive in decoding order. Each field is stored into a separate field buffer. However, some display systems only take frame buffers as input, so that two field buffers have to be combined into a frame buffer before being sent to the display. To avoid this extra processing, an HEVC decoding system using a unified frame-based decoded picture buffer is proposed. A field pair is detected by reordering the incoming fields from decoding order to output order. The decoded field pair is then stored into a unified frame buffer and output together. At the end of this paper, the system delay caused by the field pairing process is also discussed.