A fast and memory efficient video transcoder for low bit rate wireless communications

Wireless video is one of the important applications supported by upcoming 3G mobile communication systems. In this paper, we propose a fast and memory efficient DCT-domain video transcoder to convert a high quality MPEG2 video bit stream into a low bit rate MPEG4 stream with low spatial resolution for wireless video access. Compared to existing approaches, the proposed video transcoder can save more than 50% of required memory. Furthermore, the computational complexity of the proposed method is less than 30% of that required by existing methods. However, the video quality achieved by the proposed method and by existing methods is hardly distinguishable for target bit rates of 384 kb/s and 256 kb/s, as shown in our experimental results.