Meeting and Seminar Archive:

Date:  November 12, 2007

Title: Efficient Techniques for MPEG-2 to H.264 VideoTranscoding

Speaker: Dr. Jun Xin, Xilient Inc.

Abstract: MPEG-2 has become the primary format for broadcast video since being developed in the early 1990's. The new video coding standard, referred to as H.264/AVC, promises the same quality as MPEG-2 with about half the data rate. Since the H.264/AVC format has been adopted into new storage format standards, such as Blu-ray Disc, and HD-DVD, it is expected that H.264/AVC decoders will appear in consumer video recording systems soon. Certainly, as more high-definition contents become available and the desire to store more contents or to record multiple channels simultaneously increases, long recording mode will become a key feature for future consumer video recorders. To satisfy this need, novel techniques have been developed to transcode MPEG-2 broadcast video to the more compact H.264/AVC format with low complexity.

In this talk, transcoding techniques aimed for low-complexity MPEG-2 to H.264/AVC transcoding will be presented. Both intra and inter transcoding architectures and algorithms will be discussed. The key to a successful transcoder design is to take full advantage of the information already available from the MPEG-2 bitstream. Specifically, I am going to talk about efficient motion vector reuse and mode decision algorithms. I will show that the proposed algorithms achieve very good rate-distortion performance with low complexity. Compared with the cascaded decoder-encoder solution, the coding efficiency is maintained while the complexity is significantly reduced.

Biography:

Jun Xin received his Ph.D. degree from University of Washington, Seattle, Wash, USA in 2002, in electrical engineering. Since April 2007, he has been with Xilient Inc., Cupertino, CA, USA. Before joining Xilient, he was a principal member of technical staff at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), Cambridge, Mass, USA. From 1996 to 1998, he was a software engineer at Motorola-ICT Joint R&D Lab, Beijing, China. His research interests include digital video compression and communication. He has been an IEEE Member since 2003.

Slides from the talk: Nov07.pps

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