An R-D optimized transcoding resilient motion vector selection

Selection of motion vector (MV) has a significant impact on the quality of an encoded, and particularly a transcoded video, in terms of rate-distortion (R-D) performance. The conventional motion estimation process, in most existing video encoders, ignores the rate of residuals by utilizing rate and distortion of motion compensation step. This approach implies that the selected MV depends on the quantization parameter. Hence, the same MV that has been selected for high bit rate compression may not be suitable for low bit rate ones when transcoding the video with motion information reuse technique, resulting in R-D performance degradation. In this paper, we propose an R-D optimized motion selection criterion that takes into account the effect of residual rate in MV selection process. Based on the proposed criterion, a new two-piece Lagrange multiplier selection is introduced for motion estimation process. Analytical evaluations indicate that our proposed scheme results in MVs that are less sensitive to changes in bit rate or quantization parameter. As a result, MVs in the encoded bitstream may be used even after the encoded sequence has been transcoded to a lower bit rate one using re-quantization. Simulation results indicate that the proposed technique improves the quality performance of coding and transcoding without any computational overhead.