Ultra Fast H.264/AVC to HEVC Transcoder

The emerging High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard achieves significant performance improvement over H.264/AVC standard at a cost of much higher complexity. In this paper, we propose a ultra fast H.264/AVC to HEVC transcoder for multi-core processors implementing Wave front Parallel Processing (WPP) and SIMD acceleration, along with expedited motion estimation (ME) and mode decision (MD) by utilizing information extracted from the input H.264/AVC stream. Experiments using standard HEVC test bit streams show that the proposed transcoder achieves 70x speed up over the HEVC HM 8.1 reference software (including H.264 encoding) at very small rate distortion (RD) performance loss.