HEVC to VP9 transcoder

HEVC and VP9 are the current state-of-the-art in video compression, thus, it is expected that in the near future these new codecs will replace their predecessors. However, the process of converting video contents compressed with one standard to those using another standard is highly computationally expensive, since a priori the video contents must be decompressed and compressed with the target video encoder. Nevertheless, it is known that some information can be extracted from the decoding process in order to accelerate the encoding process. In this paper, a technique for transcoding from HEVC to VP9 is presented. By using some information extracted from the HEVC decoding process some coding computations will be discarded from being checked in the VP9 encoder. By applying the proposed approaches, a reduction of about 38% of the coding complexity is achieved with acceptable Rate Distortion penalties.