A fast and memory efficient video transcoder for low bit rate wireless communications

Shizhong Liu, Alan C. Bovik

Abstract: Wireless video is one of the important applications supported by upcoming 3G mobile communication systems. In this paper, we propose a fast and memory efficient DCT-domain video transcoder to convert a high quality MPEG2 video bit stream into a low bit rate MPEG4 stream with low spatial resolution for wireless video access. Compared to existing approaches, the proposed video transcoder can save more than 50% of required memory. Furthermore, the computational complexity of the proposed method is less than 30% of that required by existing methods. However, the video quality achieved by the proposed method and by existing methods is hardly distinguishable for target bit rates of 384 kb/s and 256 kb/s, as shown in our experimental results.