Fast Rules to Speedup HEVC to VVC Transcoding

Abstract

With the advent of the newly introduced Versatile Video Coding Standard (VVC) the need for converting legacy content from its widely used predecessor, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), to the new format has emerged due to the higher compression performance of the new codec. The most straightforward transcoding solution is to fully decode and re-encode the incoming video signal to the new coding format, in other respects a notably time-consuming operation. In this paper, we propose a fast HEVC to VVC transcoding algorithm that exploits the high correlation between block partitioning decisions in HEVC and VVC in order to early terminate the block partitioning process in VVC and consequently reduce the transcoding time complexity. © 2021 ACM.