Efficient HEVC to H.264/AVC Transcoding with Fast Intra Mode Decision

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard will soon reach its final draft. To provide the widely deployed H.264/AVC devices with HEVC video contents, transcoding pre-encoded HEVC video into H.264/AVC format is highly necessary. Computational complexity of H.264 hinders real-time transcoding. In this paper, we propose an efficient HEVC to H.264 intra frame transcoder to accelerate the time-consuming H.264 intra mode decision while ensure rate distortion (RD) performance. The proposed transcoder incorporates a support vector machine (SVM) based macroblock (MB) partition mode decision and a fast prediction mode decision. Compared with the reference transcoder which employs exhaustive search mode decision, our proposed transcoder can save 68.83% of transcoding time with negligible 2.32% bit-rate increase on average.

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