Fast quadtree level decision algorithm for H.264/HEVC transcoder

The High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) was developed by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) to replace the current H.264/AVC standard which has been widely adopted in the last years. Therefore, there is a lot of legacy content encoded with H.264/AVC and an efficient conversion to HEVC is needed. This paper, presents a Fast Quadtree Level Decision (FQLD) algorithm that greatly reduces the complexity of the transcoding process between H.264/AVC and HEVC. The proposal tries to exploit the information gathered at the H.264/AVC decoder to make decisions on Coding Units (CU) splitting in HEVC using a Naïve-Bayes (NB) probabilistic classifier. Experimental results show that the proposed transcoder can achieve a good tradeoff between coding efficiency and complexity.