Fast H.264/H.265 to AV1 stream transcoding using a moving object tracker

Abstract

With the AV1 codec soon coming to the global video streaming market it is important to find a way to efficiently transcode existing streams encoded with previous generation codecs, such as H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC to AV1. Because of the massively increased computational complexity of AV1 direct re-encoding is not a viable option as of today. This paper proposes a method of fast H.264/H.265 to AV1 stream transcoding based on reusing motion data from H.264/H.265 to track objects in input compressed domain and remove the need to do most of the complex inter-prediction in AV1 encoder. It is shown that the reduction in encoder run time can be significant enough to provide transcoding speeds on par with reference encoders of the previous codec generation.