Efficient Mode Decision for H.264 Down-sizing Video Transcoding Using Support Vector Machines

This paper presents an efficient mode decision scheme for down-sizing video transcoding in H.264 using support vector machines (SVMs). In order to reduce the high computational complexity of using conventional mode decision in the H.264 re-encoder, the proposed scheme uses SVMs to exploit the correlation between coding information extracted from the input high-resolution bit-stream and the coding modes of macroblocks in down-sized video frames. After the SVMs classifier, improbable modes are eliminated and only a small number of candidate modes are carried out using the RDO operations. Hence, remarkable computing time can be saved, while maintaining nearly the same quality of the transcoded pictures.