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Fast Inter Mode Decision Algorithm Based on Mode Mapping and Decision Tree for P Frames in MPEG-2 to H.264/AVC Transcoding

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Abstract

There is an inevitable requirement of transcoding from MPEG-2 to H.264/AVC in many video applications. Due to the use of variable block sizes and rate-distortion optimization techniques in H.264, there is extremely high computational complexity in the reference cascaded transcoder. To reduce the complexity, this paper presents a fast inter mode decision algorithm for P frames in MPEG-2 to H.264/AVC transcoding. Firstly, with the statistical analysis of the correlation between the MB’s coding mode in MPEG-2 and the corresponding mode in H.264/AVC, the proposed algorithm directly determines the candidate modes for some special MBs based on the mode mapping rules. Then for other MBs, machine learning tools are used to exploit the correlation between the residual MB information in MPEG-2 and the coding mode in H.264/AVC, and the decision tree is derived to determine the candidate modes. The proposed algorithm efficiently reduces the number of candidate modes in H.264/AVC encoder. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve 60 % of transcoding time saving on average with the less PSNR degradation and bitrate increase, comparing with the reference cascaded transcoder.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Project No. 61133008 and No. 61202180, China.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Room 454, School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, No. 28 Xianning West Road, Xi’an, 710049, China

    Ping Wang & Xiaodan Zhang

  2. Beijing Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Technology, School of Computer Science, Beijing Institute of Technology, No. 5 Zhongguancun South Road, Beijing, 100081, China

    Hua Huang

Authors
  1. Ping Wang
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  2. Xiaodan Zhang
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  3. Hua Huang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ping Wang.

Additional information

This research was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Project No. 61133008 and No. 61202180, China.

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Wang, P., Zhang, X. & Huang, H. Fast Inter Mode Decision Algorithm Based on Mode Mapping and Decision Tree for P Frames in MPEG-2 to H.264/AVC Transcoding. J Sign Process Syst 79, 33–43 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-013-0824-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-013-0824-5

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