Overview of Low-Complexity Video Transcoding from H.263 to H.264

With the standardization of H.264/AVC by ITU-T and ISO/IEC and the adaptatation into new hardware, the necessity of transcoding between existing standards and H.264 will arise to achieve interoperability between hardware devices. Because of the many new prediction parameters as well as the pixel-based deblocking filter and the new transform of H.264 this is a difficult task to perform. In our work we propose a fast cascaded pixel-domain transcoder from H.263 to H.264 for both intra- and inter-frame coding. The rate-distortion (RD) performance of the encoded bitstreams is compared to an exhaustive full-search approach. Our approach leads to 9% higher data rate in average, but the computational complexity for the prediction can be reduced by 90% and more. It will be shown that the algorithms proposed for H.263 are applicable for transcoding MPEG-2 to H.264, too