Motion vector refinement for high-performance transcoding

In transcoding, simply reusing the motion vectors extracted from an incoming video bit stream may not result in the best quality. In this paper, we show that the incoming motion vectors become nonoptimal due to the reconstruction errors. To achieve the best video quality possible, a new motion estimation should be performed in the transcoder. We propose a fast-search adaptive motion vector refinement scheme that is capable of providing video quality comparable to that can be achieved by performing a new full-scale motion estimation but with much less computation. We discuss the case when some incoming frames are dropped for frame-rate conversions, and propose motion vector composition method to compose a motion vector from the incoming motion vectors. The composed motion vector can also be refined using the proposed motion vector refinement scheme to achieve better results.