Essentiality Analysis of HEVC Patents

‘This report aims to understand likely essential patents to HEVC standard. The scope of the work was to identify and analyze all patents having a priority date before the first version of the HEVC standard, i.e., April 13, 2013. To determine the essentiality of a patent, each claim is manually analyzed with H.265 versions of the standard to identify whether the elements of the patented claim are present in the standard.’

We performed an extensive patent search on patent databases, which yielded an initial dataset related to video coding technology. All patents in the extracted dataset have a priority date before the publication date of the first version of HEVC, April 13, 2013.

We manually filtered results from this dataset and identified approximately 2432 unique families related to HEVC for further deeper essentiality analysis. This process involved analyzing the claims, abstracts, and detailed descriptions within the patent documents to evaluate their relevance to HEVC.

After a comprehensive analysis of 2,432 patent families related to HEVC, we found that 997 of these families are likely essential to the standard and 1,154 are non-essential to HEVC. Further, 281 patents were categorized as medium and can become essential after drawing inferences to show the key elements with the evidence.

To simplify the analysis, 1,278 patents, including most likely essential patents (997) and medium category patents (281), are analyzed for top assignees calculation with their patent counts. The distribution of these patents by the top 20 assignees is shown in Figure 1.

The reassignment analysis shown in Figure 7 reveals those notable transitions in patent ownership across various entities. Qualcomm, originally holding 140 patents has reassigned patents to Velos, Sony, Dolby, ETRI, GE, LG, Huawei, SK Telecomm. Samsung has also reassigned some of its patents to Canon, Huawei, and Hitachi.

It was determined that Velos is the active buyer of HEVC patents, as many assignees have transferred patents to Velos. Qualcomm transferred nine patents, Sony transferred four, and Huawei transferred one, as illustrated below.

We understand that patents with a priority date later than April 13, 2013, could be essential to the HEVC standard or implementer-dependent. However, the scope of this report is limited and does not consider patents with a priority date after April 13, 2013. Patents with a priority date earlier than April 13, 2013, and filing date later than April 13, 2013, were considered for essentiality analysis.

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