Motion vector refinement in a Wyner--Ziv to H.264 transcoder for mobile telephony

The authors develop a decoder/encoder system (transcoder) to solve the consumption constraint in the communications between end-user devices, when a new Wyner-Ziv (WZ)/H.264 framework is defined for being used in mobile-to-mobile environments. This approach is based on leaving to the devices only WZ video encoding and traditional video decoding; the lowest complexity algorithms in both paradigms. The system shifts the burden of complexity to the network, where an improved transcoder that reuses information between both paradigms is allocated. The WZ decoding motion vectors are used to reduce the H.264 motion estimation process. The proposed transcoder offers a complexity reduction up to 60- on average, without any rate distortion drop.