  High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) has doubled the video compression ratio
with equivalent subjective quality as compared to its predecessor H.264/AVC.
The significant coding efficiency improvement is attributed to many new
techniques. Inter-frame coding is one of the most powerful yet complicated
techniques therein and has posed high computational burden thus main obstacle
in HEVC-based real-time applications. Recently, plenty of research has been
done to optimize the inter-frame coding, either to reduce the complexity for
real-time applications, or to further enhance the encoding efficiency. In this
paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art techniques for
HEVC inter-frame coding from three aspects, namely fast inter coding solutions,
implementation on different hardware platforms as well as advanced inter coding
techniques. More specifically, different algorithms in each aspect are further
subdivided into sub-categories and compared in terms of pros, cons, coding
efficiency and coding complexity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the
first such comprehensive review of the recent advances of the inter-frame
coding for HEVC and hopefully it would help the improvement, implementation and
applications of HEVC as well as the ongoing development of the next generation
video coding standard.
