H.264/AVC baseline profile to MPEG-4 visual simple profile transcoding to reduce the spatial resolution

In this study, we propose a heterogeneous transcoding method of converting an H.264/Advanced video coding (AVC) Baseline profile (BP) video bitstream into an MPEG-4 Visual simple profile (VSP) video bitstream. The proposed method reduces the spatial resolution for mobile terminals, which support only low resolution video bitstreams. When the H.264/AVC BP video bitstream is transformed into the MPEG-4 VSP video bitstream, the conversions between the H.264/AVC BP block types and the MPEG-4 VSP block types are performed by analyzing the macroblocks (MBs) conversion probability and calculating the difference values of motion vector. The proposed transcoding method runs on average 5.5 times faster than the cascaded transcoding methods, for a degradation of the PSNR (peaksignal-to ratio) of less than 0.5 dB. VC 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 16, 24–33, 2006; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ima.20064