Efficient motion vector re-estimation for MPEG-2 TO H.264/AVC transcoding with arbitrary down-sizing ratios

As for down-sizing MPEG-2 to H.264/AVC transcoding, an efficient algorithm of estimating initial H.264/AVC motion vectors is proposed. By using the estimated initial motion vectors, only a small range of motion vector refinement is sufficient to find the final motion vector for each partition. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithm achieves average 0.08 dB improvement (maximum 0.24 dB) in the picture quality compared to the other state-of-art method. At the same time, the computational complexity of estimating the initial motion vectors is less than that of the other state-of-art technique (average 36% reduction).