An efficient VC-1 to H.264 IPB-picture transcoder with pixel domain processing

VC-1 is one of the three video coding standards for Blu-ray DVD, which also includes MPEG-2 and H.264. In this paper, an efficient transcoding algorithm from VC-1 video to H.264 video is discussed, we present a transcoder that addresses I, P, B, and interlaced pictures. The main differences between the two standards are analyzed and a solution for transforming from one to the other is presented. The paper proposes a pixel domain transcoder which exploits the variable size transform used in VC-1 to select the variable block size for motion compensation in H.264. We also discuss transcoding of high profile video features; in particular, adaptive size transform and interlacing. Experimental results show that the pixel domain approach reduces computational complexity by more than 50 % as compared to a cascaded one with negligible drop in peak-signal-to-noise-ratio (PSNR).