Adaptive Fast Quadtree Level Decision Algorithm for H.264 to HEVC Video Transcoding

作者：Jesus Diaz Honrubia Antonio; Luis Martinez Jose; Cuenca Pedro^*; Antonio Gamez Jose; Miguel Puerta Jose

来源：IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 2016, 26(1): 154-168.

DOI：10.1109/TCSVT.2015.2473299

• Coding unit (CU) splitting
• H.264/Advanced Video Coding (AVC)
• High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC)
• software partitioning
• transcoding

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) was developed by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding to replace the current H.264/Advanced Video Coding (AVC) standard, which has dominated digital video services in all segments of the domestic and professional markets for over ten years. Therefore, there is a lot of legacy content encoded with H.264/AVC, and an efficient video transcoding from H.264/AVC to HEVC will be needed to enable gradual migration to HEVC. In terms of rate-distortion (RD) performance, HEVC roughly doubles the RD compression performance of H.264/AVC at the expense of a high computational cost. HEVC adopts a quadtree-based coding unit (CU) block partitioning structure that is flexible in adapting various texture characteristics of images. However, this causes a dramatic increase in computational complexity due to the necessity of finding the best CU partitions. This paper presents an adaptive fast quadtree level decision algorithm that is designed to exploit the information gathered at the H.264/AVC decoder in order to make faster decisions on CU splitting in HEVC using a Naive-Bayes probabilistic classifier that is determined by a supervised data mining process. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve a good tradeoff between coding efficiency and complexity compared with the anchor transcoder; moreover, it outperforms other related works available in the literature.

• 出版日期2016-1