Low-Consumption Partial Transcoding by HEVC

A transcoding scheme for the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is proposed that allows any partial frame modification to be followed by a partial re-compression of only the modified areas, while guaranteeing identical reconstruction of non-modified areas. To this end, first, syntax elements of all Coding Units (CU) in the frame are parsed and decoded according to their scan order. Then CUs that are collocated with a replaced area are re-encoded with new content to generate a partial set of new syntax elements. In order to avoid spatial propagation of the decoding mismatch due to the new content, CUs on the border of the replaced area are losslessly coded such that reconstruction of immediately neighboring CUs in the scan order are protected from the modification. The proposed method has been implemented on top of the HEVC test Model (HM) in All-Intra (AI) coding configuration and experiments show that, depending on the test parameters, it can offer both a bitrate saving (up to 4% in terms of BD-BR) and a transcoding acceleration (up to 83%) compared to a full transcoding scheme.