Mode decision acceleration for H.264/AVC to SVC temporal video transcoding

This study presents a fast video transcoding architecture that overcomes the complexity of different coding structures between H.264/AVC and SVC. The proposed algorithms simplify the mode decision process in SVC owing to its heavy computations. Two scenarios namely transcoding with the same quantization parameter and bitrate reduction are considered. In the first scenario, SVC’s modes are determined by the probability models, including conditional probability, Bayesian theorem, and Markov chain. The second scenario measures MB activity to determine SVC’s modes. Experimental results indicate that our algorithm saves significant coding time with negligible PSNR loss over that when using a cascaded pixel-domain transcoder.