A scalable MPEG-2 bit-rate transcoder with graceful degradation

This paper describes a scalable MPEG-2 bit-rate transcoder that scales from low complexity, resulting in moderate picture quality, to high complexity with much better quality. The algorithm presents a very fine grain scalability in terms of complexity, making this solution especially suitable for software implementations, in order to benefit from the available resources to increase picture quality. Picture quality degrades gracefully when the complexity of the algorithm is decreased