As an extension of H.264/AVC, Scalable Video Coding (SVC) provides the ability to adapt to heterogeneous networks and user-end requirements, which offers great scalability in multi-point applications such as videoconferencing. However, transcoding between SVC and AVC becomes necessary due to the existence of legacy AVC-based systems. The straightforward full re-encoding method requires great computational cost, and the fast SVC-to-AVC spatial transcoding techniques have not been thoroughly investigated yet. This paper proposes a low-complexity hybrid-domain SVC-to-AVC spatial transcoder with drift compensation, which provides even better coding efficiency than the full re-encoding method. The macroblocks (MBs) of input SVC bitstream are divided into two types, and each type is suitable for pixel- or transform-domain processing respectively. In the pixel-domain transcoding, a fast re-encoding method is proposed based on mode mapping and motion vector (MV) refinement. In the transform-domain transcoding, the quantized transform coefficients together with other motion data are reused directly to avoid re-quantization loss. The drift problem caused by proposed transcoder is solved by compensation techniques for I frame and P frame respectively. Simulation results show that proposed transcoder achieves averagely 96.4% time reduction compared with the full re-encoding method, and outperforms the reference methods in coding efficiency.

Scalable Video Coding (SVC) was standardized as an extension of H.264/AVC with the intention to provide flexible adaptation to heterogeneous networks and different end-user requirements, which provides great scalability in multi-point applications such as video conferencing. However, due to the existence of H.264/AVC-based systems, transcoding between AVC and SVC becomes necessary. Most existing works focus on temporal transcoding, quality transcoding or SVC-to-AVC spatial transcoding while the straightforward re-encoding method requires high computational cost. This paper proposes a low-complexity AVC-to-SVC spatial transcoder based on coarse-level mode mapping for video conferencing scenes. First, to omit unnecessary motion estimations (ME) for layers with reduced resolution, an ME skipping scheme based on AVC mode distribution is proposed with an adaptive search range. Then a probability-profile based scheme is proposed for further mode skipping. After that 3 coarse-level mode-mapping methods are presented for fast mode decision and the adaptive usage of the 3 methods is discussed. Finally, motion vector (MV) refinement is introduced for further lower-layer time reduction. As for the top layer, direct encapsulation is proposed to preserve better quality and another scheme involving inter-layer predictions is also provided for bandwidth-crucial applications. Simulation results show that proposed transcoder achieves up to 92.6% time reduction without significant coding efficiency loss compared to re-encoding method.