Transcoding from H.264/AVC to awavelet-based scalable video codec

Scalable Video Coding (SVC) enables low complexity adaptation according to transmission and display requirements, providing an efficient solution for video content delivery through heterogeneous networks. However, legacy video and most commercially available content capturing devices use conventional non-scalable coding, e.g., H.264/AVC, to compress and store video streams. As a consequence and in order to fully exploit the advantages of SVC technology, efficient transcoding from conventionally coded to scalable content is urgently needed. In this paper an efficient transcoder from H.264/AVC to a wavelet-based SVC is proposed. The complexity of the transcoder is kept very low by using information extracted directly from the decoded H.264/AVC bitstream, such as motion vectors and the presence of residual data. The proposed approach has been tested with well known benchmarking sequences, showing a good performance in terms of decoded video quality and system complexity.