Effective H.264/AVC to HEVC transcoder based on prediction homogeneity

The new video coding standard, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), has been established to succeed the widely used H.264/AVC standard. However, an enormous amount of legacy content is encoded with H.264/AVC. This makes high performance AVC to HEVC transcoding in great need. This paper presents a fast transcoding algorithm based on residual and motion information extracted from H.264 decoder. By exploiting these side information, regions´ homogeneity characteristic are analysed. An efficient coding unit (CU) and prediction unit (PU) mode decision strategy is proposed combing regions´ prediction homogeneity and current encoding information. The experimental results show that the proposed transcoding scheme can save up to 55% of encoding time with negligible loss of coding efficiency, when compared to that of the full decoding and full encoding transcoder.