Low-complexity transcoding from H.264 to HEVC based on motion vector clustering

The forthcoming high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard substantially improves the coding efficiency compared with the H.264 standard. It also brings in much higher computational complexity. Transcoding from H.264 to HEVC is an important step to enable gradual migration to HEVC. A low-complexity H.264 to HEVC transcoding algorithm based on motion vector clustering is proposed. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can reduce up to 40% of the computational time compared to the original method, while maintaining a high rate-distortion performance.