Fast H.264/AVC-to-SVC transcoding in a mobile television environment

Abstract

Mobile TV environments demand flexible video compression like Scalable Video Coding (SVC) because of varying bandwidths and devices. Since existing infrastructures highly rely on H.264/AVC video compression, network providers could adapt the current H.264/AVC encoded video to SVC. This adaptation needs to be done efficiently to reduce processing power and operational cost. Since a cascaded decoder-encoder solution is too complex to be practical, we developed a mechanism to encode scalable video streams from existing H.264/AVC encoded video streams. This paper proposes a novel technique to accelerate the encoding of SVC streams by reusing information from the H.264/AVC stream and the base layer. We achieved a complexity reduction of 52%, while only an insignificant bit rate increase is reported (0.2%). According to these results, an H.264/AVC-to-SVC transcoder is usable with a low operational cost without compromising the coding efficiency. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.