Complexity scalable H.264/AVC-to-SVC transcoding

Abstract

Transcoding techniques require a high complexity and reduce the video quality with every transcoding step. When transcoding an input bitstream to scalable video coding (SVC), only one adaptation step is required and a scaled bitstream is extractable afterwards. To reduce the H.264/AVC-to-SVC transcoding complexity, we propose a transcoding architecture which combines optimized closed- and open-loop transcoding techniques. This transcoder scales the complexity depending on the available resources. Relative to a cascaded decoder-encoder the complexity can be reduced by 99.28%, while a high rate distortion efficiency is maintained and a high degree of scalability guaranteed.