H.264/AVC to HEVC Video Transcoder Based on Dynamic Thresholding and Content Modeling

The new video coding standard, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), was developed to succeed the current standard, H.264/AVC, as the state of the art in video compression. However, there is a lot of legacy content encoded with H.264/AVC. This paper proposes and evaluates several transcoding algorithms from the H.264/AVC to the HEVC format. In particular, a novel transcoding architecture, in which the first frames of the sequence are used to compute the parameters so that the transcoder can learn the mapping for that particular sequence, is proposed. Then, two types of mode mapping algorithms are proposed. In the first solution, a single H.264/AVC coding parameter is used to determine the outgoing HEVC partitions using dynamic thresholding. The second solution uses linear discriminant functions to map the incoming H.264/AVC coding parameters to the outgoing HEVC partitions. This paper contains experiments designed to study the impact of the number of frames used for training in the transcoder. Comparisons with existing transcoding solutions reveal that the proposed work results in lower rate-distortion loss at a competitive complexity performance.