A Novel Objective Quality Assessment Method for Transcoded Videos From H.264/AVC to H.265/HEVC Utilizing Probability Theory

The latest video coding standard H.265/HEVC is developed to succeed the previous coding standard H.264/AVC. However, a large amount of legacy content was coded with H.246/AVC. Therefore, transcoding from H.264/AVC to H.265/HEVC format is required. During the process of transcoding, we can easily calculate the distortion of the transcoded video with respect to the H.264/AVC-decoded video. However, since the original video is usually unavailable, the distortion between the original video and the transcoded video is unknown, which makes it difficult to control the coding quality of the transcoded video compared to the original video. In this paper, we propose a novel and accurate quality estimation method for transcoded videos utilizing probability theory. Experimental results demonstrate that the predicted quality of transcoded videos approximate the true value, with an average error of 0.28 dB, 0.41 dB, and 0.46 dB for Y, Cb, and Cr components, respectively.

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