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Fast video transcoding from H.263 to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC

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Abstract

In the past 10 years detailed works on different video transcoders have been published. However, the new ITU-T Recommendation H.264—also adapted as ISO/IEC MPEG-4 Part 10 (AVC)—provides many new encoding options for the prediction processes that lead to difficulties for low complexity transcoding. In this work we present very fast transcoding techniques to convert H.263 bitstreams into H.264/AVC bitstreams. We will give reasoning, why the proposed pixel domain approach is advantageous in this scenario instead of using a DCT domain transcoder. Our approach results in less than 9% higher data rate at equivalent PSNR quality compared to a full-search approach. But this rate loss allows the reduction of the search complexity by a factor of over 200 for inter frames and still a reduction of over 70% for intra frames. A comparison to a fast search algorithm is given. We also provide simulation results that our algorithm works for transcoding MPEG-2 to H.264/AVC in the aimed scenario.

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Correspondence to Jens Bialkowski.

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Bialkowski, J., Barkowsky, M. & Kaup, A. Fast video transcoding from H.263 to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. Multimed Tools Appl 35, 127–146 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-007-0126-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-007-0126-7

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