Video transcoding architectures for multimedia real time services

In third generation telecommunication systems, communication technologies are very heterogeneous. The goal of transcoding is to enable the interoperability of heterogeneous multimedia networks reducing the complexity and the running time by avoiding the total decoding and re-encoding of a video stream. Temporal transcoding is one of the solutions to reduce the overall bit rate by dropping some frames of the video sequence. We propose two temporal transcoding architectures allowing real-time communication. We compare the performance of both our architectures with that of a quality transcoder. A better performance is achieved by quality transcoding for videos with a lot of motion and by temporal transcoding for videos with little motion.