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Low-complexity heterogeneous architecture for H.264/HEVC video transcoding

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Abstract

High efficiency video coding (HEVC) was developed by the Joint Collaborative Team on video coding to replace the current H.264/AVC standard, which has been widely adopted over the last few 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 hybrid transcoding algorithm which makes use of soft computing techniques as well as parallel processing. On the one hand, a fast quadtree level decision algorithm tries to exploit the information gathered at the H.264/AVC decoder to make faster decisions on coding unit splitting in HEVC using a Naïve–Bayes probabilistic classifier that is determined by a supervised data mining process. On the other hand, a parallel HEVC-encoding algorithm makes use of a heterogeneous platform composed of a multi-core central processing unit plus a graphics processing unit (GPU). In this way, from a coarse point of view, groups of frames or rows of a frame (both options are possible) are divided into threads to be executed on each core (each of which executes one of the aforementioned classifiers) and, from a finer point of view, all these threads work in a collaborative way on a single GPU to perform the motion estimation process on the co-processor. Experimental results show that the proposed transcoder can achieve a good tradeoff between coding efficiency and complexity compared with the anchor transcoder.

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Notes

  1. A value of 2.0 means that we have estimated that the cost of wrongly classifying \(C_S\) as \(C_N\) is twice that of the contrary error. This type of error at high levels (0 or 1) can have a great impact on the output sequence, because subsequent low-level splitting is not considered.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Albacete Research Institute of Informatics (I3A), University of Castilla-La Mancha, 02071, Albacete, Spain

    Antonio Jesús Díaz-Honrubia, Gabriel Cebrián-Márquez, José Luis Martínez, Pedro Cuenca, José Miguel Puerta & José Antonio Gámez

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  1. Antonio Jesús Díaz-Honrubia
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  2. Gabriel Cebrián-Márquez
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  3. José Luis Martínez
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  4. Pedro Cuenca
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  5. José Miguel Puerta
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  6. José Antonio Gámez
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Correspondence to Antonio Jesús Díaz-Honrubia.

Additional information

This work has been jointly supported by the MINECO and European Commission (FEDER funds) under the projects TIN2012-38341-C04-04, TIN2010-20900-C04-03 and TIN2013-46638-C3-3-P. Likewise, this work has also been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports under Grants FPU 12/00994 and FPU 13/04601.

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Díaz-Honrubia, A.J., Cebrián-Márquez, G., Martínez, J.L. et al. Low-complexity heterogeneous architecture for H.264/HEVC video transcoding. J Real-Time Image Proc 12, 311–327 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11554-014-0477-z

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