Low complexity rate control for VC-1 to H.264 transcoding

In this paper we focus on rate-control VC-1 to H.264 video transcoding in which video quality is obtained while maintaining a target bit rate for the transcoded output. The relationship between rate control in VC-1 and H.264 is studied and we use the rate control information obtained from VC-1 encoding to simplify the rate control algorithm in H.264. The key idea is to find the relationship between the quantization parameters (QPs) in VC-1 to the QPs in H.264 so that the first can be used to estimate the second, short cutting the need for a complex estimation in H.264. Experimental results show that the proposed rate control for transcoding is less complex than that for a full cascaded decoder while maintaining the target bit rate and PSNR.