Cost-efficient HEVC-based quadtree splitting (HEQUS) for VVC Video Transcoding

The release of the latest video coding standard, known as Versatile Video Coding (VVC), has created the need to convert current High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) content to this new standard. However, the traditional cascade transcoding pipeline is not effective due to the exorbitant computational complexity of VVC. With this in mind, this paper proposes a fast HEVC-VVC transcoder that implements a probabilistic classifier based on Naïve-Bayes at the first partitioning level (128 × 128 pixels). This model uses features extracted from the 128 × 128 size blocks of the residual and reconstructed frames in the HEVC bitstream, and their correlation with the block partitioning structure. For the subsequent VVC coding depth levels, partitioning decisions are derived from the HEVC structure. The results achieve a 57.08% transcoding time reduction with a BD-rate penalty of 2.40%, compared with a traditional transcoding approach for the random access encoding configuration.