Fast and energy-efficient HEVC transrating based on frame partitioning inheritance
Thiago Bubolz, Ruhan Conceição, Mateus Grellert, Bruno Zatt, Luciano Volcan Agostini, Guilherme Corrêa · 2018
Video transcoding for bit rate adaptation, usually called transrating, has become an essential task to allow the transmission of different versions of the same video in streaming services and live applications. However, as the transrating operation is comprised of a decoding and an encoding step in sequence, it requires long processing times and high energy consumption, which is prohibitive in large-scale systems or battery-operated devices. This work proposes a fast and energy-efficient HEVC transrating strategy that can be employed in any HEVC codec implementation. The solution is based on a frame partitioning analysis that led to the definition of an inheritance rule between the decoding and the encoding steps. Experimental results have shown that the strategy is able to reduce the HEVC transrating time by 48.5% and the energy consumption by 50.4%, on average, with a negligible loss of 0.818% in encoding efficiency.