Read HEVC frames using matlab

Question

I want to read HEVC compressed video and extract the frames in compressed(encoded) video file to extract some information from frames like motion vectors etc..

can anyone help me how to read the compressed HEVC video file, and how to extract frames using matlab in windows OS.

VideoReader in matlab will read upto H.264 encoded videos but not H.265/HEVC encoded videos.

I have downloaded few HEVC compressed videos from http://www.elecard.com/en/download/videos.html and downloaded the codec tool kit from this website , I can play these videos.

Answer 1

AFAIK there is no public code or library that enables reading an HEVC datastream directly from MATLAB.

When faced with this same problem, I modified the reference HEVC decoder to write a separate CSV file as it decodes the HEVC video. MATLAB can then read the CSV file.

I borrowed this approach from GitlHEVCAnalyzer. See TSysuAnalyzerOutput.cpp, where the author writes a number of different text files during HEVC decoding. The analyzer then reads the text files.

Answer 2

There is no official release for HEVC/H.265 codec in MATLAB because HEVC is not a royalty-free software and it is the reason that the tech Giants make an alternative video coding without any licensing fee. Therefore, HEVC is currently used mostly in scientific literature nowadays. However, you can encode/decode YUV format video data in HEVC using HM reference software which is available in this link. To encode, you need Visual Studio installed on your Windows machine. Firstly, open your command prompt and type:

msbuild /p:Configuration=Release HM_vc2015.sln

After building the project, you can find some files in /bin folder. Then, you should change your current directory to /bin folder using cd command and type:

TAppEncoderStatic.exe -c your_config_file.cfg -i your_video_data.yuv

Hence, str.bin file will be created in /bin folder which can be renamed using your_config_file.cfg or command-line options which is thoroughly explained in the software manual. Also, you can find good config files in the /cfg folder. To decode the str.bin just type:

TAppDecoderStatic.exe -b str.bin -o dec.yuv

Note that dec.yuv is the decoded output video data in the decoder. Also, you can see the decoded and original video sequence using a YUV viewer. Moreover, you can find a good dataset here.