Hybrid H.264 Video Transcoding for Bitrate Reduction in Wireless Networks

Multimedia applications have become the most promising applications over wireless networks. However,wireless networks have lower bandwidth than wired networks, this calls for fast bitrate reduction techniques through video transcoding that can deliver the best video quality to the receiver while adhering to the bitrate constraints of the wireless network.This paper presents a hybrid homogenous H.264 video transcoding method in order to reduce the bitrate for wireless video communication. In the paper, we propose to transcode intra frame with cascaded pixel-domain architecture and inter frame with open-loop architecture, furthermore, we propose a drift error compensation algorithm for P frames in order to maintain the transcoding quality. Simulation results show that the hybrid transcoding method has lower computation complexity and higher transcoded quality; it can be effectively applied to transcode H.264 video stream in wireless networks.