Bandwidth reduction schemes for MPEG-2 to H.264 transcoder design

In MPEG-2 to H.264 transcoding, MPEG-2 motion vector (MV) reuse is an effective technique to simplify motion estimation (ME) processing. The irregularity of MPEG-2 MV also brings difficulty in applying data reuse method for hardware design, which plays a critical role for bandwidth reduction. In this paper, two search window reuse methods are introduced for HDTV application. The Level C method utilizes horizontal search window reuse for most macroblock (MB), while the Level C+ method is designed for ultralow bandwidth applications by reusing both horizontal and vertical search window. Experiment results show both methods can achieve a low bandwidth level with negligible video quality loss.