Low-Complexity Hybrid-Domain H.264/SVC to H.264/AVC Spatial Transcoding with Drift Compensation for Videoconferencing

Lei SUN  Zhenyu LIU  Takeshi IKENAGA  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences   Vol.E96-A   No.11   pp.2142-2153
Publication Date: 2013/11/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1337
DOI: 10.1587/transfun.E96.A.2142
Print ISSN: 0916-8508
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Smart Multimedia & Communication Systems)
Category: Image Processing
Keyword: 
SVC-to-AVC transcoding,  spatial scalability,  hybrid-domain,  drift compensation,  videoconferencing,  

Full Text: PDF>>
Buy this Article



Summary: 
As an extension of H.264/AVC, Scalable Video Coding (SVC) provides the ability to adapt to heterogeneous networks and user-end requirements, which offers great scalability in multi-point applications such as videoconferencing. However, transcoding between SVC and AVC becomes necessary due to the existence of legacy AVC-based systems. The straightforward full re-encoding method requires great computational cost, and the fast SVC-to-AVC spatial transcoding techniques have not been thoroughly investigated yet. This paper proposes a low-complexity hybrid-domain SVC-to-AVC spatial transcoder with drift compensation, which provides even better coding efficiency than the full re-encoding method. The macroblocks (MBs) of input SVC bitstream are divided into two types, and each type is suitable for pixel- or transform-domain processing respectively. In the pixel-domain transcoding, a fast re-encoding method is proposed based on mode mapping and motion vector (MV) refinement. In the transform-domain transcoding, the quantized transform coefficients together with other motion data are reused directly to avoid re-quantization loss. The drift problem caused by proposed transcoder is solved by compensation techniques for I frame and P frame respectively. Simulation results show that proposed transcoder achieves averagely 96.4% time reduction compared with the full re-encoding method, and outperforms the reference methods in coding efficiency.