Efficient HEVC-to-VVC Transcoder Based On A Bayesian Classifier For The First Quadtree Depth Level

In the coming years, the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard will be launched to replace the current High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, making it necessary to find efficient methods to convert existing multimedia content to the new format. However, transcoding is a complex pipeline composed of a decoding and an encoding process that involves long processing times. On the basis of the existing correlation between the block partitioning structures of both standards, this paper presents an HEVC-to-VVC transcoding scheme. The proposed method consists of a Naïve-Bayes classifier that assists the partitioning decision at the first level of quadtree by using features extracted from the 128×128 pixel blocks of the residual and reconstructed frames in HEVC. The experimental results using random access configuration show an average transcoding time reduction of 13.38% at the cost of a compression efficiency loss of 0.32% in terms of BD-rate.