Low Complexity Transcoding from HEVC to VVC

Video transcoding, which is a long-standing problem in video coding, can be used for a variety of applications including bit rate conversion, format conversion and video resolution conversion. In this paper, we present an effective transcoding solution from the popular previous generation video coding standard, High Efficiency Video Coding standard (HEVC), to Versatile Video Coding (VVC) which is the latest standard developed by JVET. VVC enjoys much better coding efficiency compared to its ancestors at the expense of higher encoding complexity. To facilitate the fast transcoding, we propose a low-complexity HEVC to VVC transcoding scheme. More specifically, the partition and motion information, which implies the intrinsic spatial and temporal characteristics of the video sequence, is inherited from HEVC for VVC encoding. The proposed scheme is tailored for HEVC to VVC conversion, and experimental results show the proposed method can achieve 31% encoding time saving with only 0.85%, 0.70% and 0.74% Bjontegaard delta rate (BD-rate) loss on average for Y, Cb and Cr components, respectively, under random access configuration.