General Architecture for MPEG-2/H.263/H.264 to H.264 Inter P Frame Video Transcoding

Abstract: The latest international video coding standard H.264/AVC significantly achieves better coding performance compared to prior video coding standards such as MPEG-2 and H.263, which have been widely used in today’s digital video applications. To provide the interoperability between different coding standards, this paper proposes an efficient and general architecture for MPEG-2/H.263/H.264/AVC to H.264/AVC inter P frame transcoding, using the original information such as coded mode type (CMT), coded block pattern (CBP) and motion vector (MV). The experimental results conducted on H.264/AVC reference software JM12.2 reveal that average 93 % of computation (re-encoding) time can be saved (corresponding to a speed-up factor of 16), while still preserving good coding performance when compared with complex cascaded pixel domain transcoding (CCPDT). The results also indicate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms other distinct algorithms, in both rate-distortion performance and computation performance.