Fast Intra Prediction Mode Decision for MPEG-2 to H.264 Transcoding

The H.264/AVC standard, jointly developed by the ITU-T and the MPEG committees, is becoming prevalent in video industry. This makes an important demand for transcoding technology to convert the large volumes of existent video sequences from the MPEG-2 into the H.264 format. However, in MPEG-2 to H.264 transcoding, intra-mode decision is a complex process and requires a great deal of computation. In this paper, we analyze the relationship between the best intra mode and 8times8 DCT coefficients. By taking use of this relationship, we present an efficient intra mode decision algorithm. The experiment results show that the proposed algorithm can greatly reduce the computational complexity while maintaining the similar SNR performance.