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Fast transcoding from H.264 to HEVC based on region feature analysis

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Abstract

The new video coding standard, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), achieves much higher coding efficiency than the state-of-the-art H.264. Transcoding H.264 video to HEVC video is important to enable gradual migration to HEVC. Therefore, a fast H.264 to HEVC transcoding algorithm based on region feature analysis is proposed. First, each frame is segmented into three regions in units of coding tree unit (CTU) based on the correlation between image coding complexities and coding bits of the H.264 source stream. Then the searching depth range of each CTU is adaptively decided according to the region type. After that, motion vectors are de-noise filtered and clustered in order to analyze the region features of coding unit (CU). Based on the analysis results, the minimum searching depth of CU and partitions of prediction unit (PU) are optimally selected, and the motion vector predictor and search window size of motion estimation are also optimally decided for further reduction of the computational complexity. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves a significant improvement on transcoding speed, while maintaining high Rate-Distortion performance.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the journal reviewers for their valuable suggestions. This work was supported in part by National Natural Science Foundation (grant 40927001), Program for Zhejiang Leading Team of S&T Innovation (grant 2011R09021-02), and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, China.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Advanced Digital Technology and Instrument, Zhejiang University, Hang Zhou, China

    Wei Jiang, Yaowu Chen & Xiang Tian

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  1. Wei Jiang
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  2. Yaowu Chen
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  3. Xiang Tian
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Correspondence to Wei Jiang.

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Jiang, W., Chen, Y. & Tian, X. Fast transcoding from H.264 to HEVC based on region feature analysis. Multimed Tools Appl 73, 2179–2200 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-013-1675-6

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