Effective H.264/AVC to HEVC transcoder based on prediction homogeneity

The new video coding standard, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), has been established to succeed the widely used H.264/AVC standard. However, an enormous amount of legacy content is encoded with H.264/AVC. This makes high performance AVC to HEVC transcoding in great need. This paper presents a fast transcoding algorithm based on residual and motion information extracted from H.264 decoder. By exploiting these side information, regions' homogeneity characteristic are analysed. An efficient coding unit (CU) and prediction unit (PU) mode decision strategy is proposed combing regions' prediction homogeneity and current encoding information. The experimental results show that the proposed transcoding scheme can save up to 55% of encoding time with negligible loss of coding efficiency, when compared to that of the full decoding and full encoding transcoder.