Fast Inter Prediction for H.264 to HEVC Transcoding

Abstract

H.264 video compression standard has achieved great success in real life applications. It has been widely used for video streaming and video storage. Even Bluray Disc (BD) adopts H.264 as its specifications. However, the next generation of video compression standard HEVC is completed in 2013. Under the same subjective quality, HEVC can save about 50% bitrate compared with H.264 Thus, Abstr act. Owing to the high compression efficiency improvement of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, it is expected as a successor to H.264. The widely usage of H.264 today and the expected future adoption of HEVC raises a new demand for H.264 to HEVC transcoding. An efficient transcoding way is necessary. In this paper, the proposed pixel domain transcoding architecture reuses the coding information such as motion vector, prediction mode and residual coefficient extracted from the H.264 decoder. An adaptive search range algorithm for motion estimation and several CU/PU pruning strategies for mode decision are proposed to speed up the encoder. The experimental results show that our proposed transcoding scheme can maintain the coding performance and save about 40% encoding time.