Compressed-domain reverse play of MPEG video streams

We present several compressed-domain methods for reverse- play transcoding of MPEG video streams. A reverse-play transcoder takes any original MPEG IPB bitstream as input and creates an output MPEG IPB bitstream which, when decoded by a generic MPEG decoder, displays the original video games in reverse order. A baseline spatial-domain method requires decoding the MPEG bitstream, storing and reordering the decoded video frames, and re-encoding the reordered video. The proposed compressed-domain transcoding methods achieve an order of magnitude reduction in computational complexity over the baseline spatial-domain approach. Much of the savings are achieved by using the forward motion vector fields available in the forward-play MPEG bitstream to efficiently generate the reverse motion vector fields used in the reverse-play MPEG bitstream. Furthermore, the storage requirements of the compressed-domain methods are reduced and the resulting image quality is within 0.6 dB of the baseline spatial-domain approach for a difficult highly detailed computer-generated video sequence. For more typical video sequences, the resulting image quality is even closer to the baseline spatial-domain approach.